Network Next Boss on How They're Planning to Cut 20-30ms Off Your Latency When Playing Online Multiplayer Games

In late January, Network Next revealed its ambitious plans to improve latency in online games, positing that the Internet is currently 'broken' for game traffic. Network Side by side besides announced a partnership with Psyonix to deliver the first implementation of the technology in the pop Rocket League game.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the technology would use Limelight's Points of Presence in the U.s.a.. Yet, we still had a off-white corporeality of questions on how Network Next intends to improve the online multiplayer experience for anybody, which is why we contacted CEO Glenn Fiedler (a veteran of the games industry who worked on games like Tribes: Vengeance and Titanfall) to learn more details. You tin can notice our chat below.

Hither's a live map of the Network Adjacent technology in action.

Tin can y'all describe, in layman's terms (or as shut as it gets, anyhow), what happens behind the scenes when using Network Next to deliver lower latency?

When you visit a website, a type of company called a "CDN" (content delivery network), accelerates delivery of static content similar images and video on that website.

CDNs practice this past pushing the static content really close to your ISP'south network, and then it's faster to download. To exercise all of this, they need to interconnect with those ISPs and in many cases, accept their ain private net backbone.

Network Next is a way to take this infrastructure already built for accelerating websites and use it to accelerate game traffic, which is far more dynamic and interactive than normal "static" web content.

Our technology steers game traffic off the public internet and across these private networks that are faster and less congested. This lowers latency and improves consistency when you play a game that integrates our technology.

Can you lot provide some concrete examples of how much of a latency drop you're currently seeing with your technology in Rocket League?

It's too early on for us to talk near specific customers.

We've seen cases where players accept their latency reduced from 120ms to 20ms. These players have a terrible route to the game server and our engineering is able to fix that.

The boilerplate case isn't quite so dramatic, just 20-30ms improvements are mutual. Nosotros also reduce bundle loss and jitter so the play experience is meliorate, even if the ISP is already doing a pretty adept job and the latency is around the same.

Will it exist plenty of an improvement to make competitive gaming between players in different continents viable?

We can't beat the speed of light, but we can get as shut as possible...

In cases where multiple undersea cables be between countries, our technology ensures that your game traffic takes the lowest latency path, which significantly reduces latency for international play.

In the time to come, we're looking at LEO (low world orbit) satellite internet coming in, which will really provide fifty-fifty greater latency reduction for overseas cases, because the speed of light in fiber optic cables is actually 2/tertiary's the speed of light in a vacuum.

This ways that for international packets it'south paradoxically faster to go up to the LEO satellites, around the globe via lasers between satellites (speed of light in a vacuum) so back downwards to the ground. This sounds similar science fiction but information technology'southward actually happening RIGHT At present.

How does the upcoming advent of 5G and cloud game streaming (Projection xCloud, Project Stream, etc.) technologies intersect with your initiative, if at all?

5G and edge compute initiatives are interesting considering they open up upwardly stuff similar location-based AR, merely why waste material all this cool border compute on game streaming? Game streaming actually adds latency to the game. Shouldn't we exist using technology to reduce latency for players instead?

Are you going to accept to deal with traditional CDNs or Telco CDNs? Will it be harder in the European Matrimony given that you'd have to deal with different companies in each country?

We deal by and large with traditional CDNs. The reason we like working with traditional CDNs is that by partnering with just i of them (for example, Limelight), we get instant worldwide coverage, including Europe, without needing to negotiate with individual ISPs.

Other than Rocket League, are y'all already in contact with other developers of live or in evolution games? If so, are yous at liberty say who they are?

We're talking with many games companies and the overwhelming response is that they're very interested in making their games play amend over the cyberspace. Nosotros're not at liberty to say who nosotros're speaking to, but we'll have more to share in the time to come.

Are yous looking for whatsoever boosted funding in the short or mid-term?

We accept all the funding we need to execute on our vision right now.

Is there anything else you'd similar to add together virtually Network Side by side?

We're hiring! 🙂

Thanks for your fourth dimension.