[NCLUG] Re: DSL Throttling or General Congestion?

[Michael Milligan]

Brian Wood wrote:
> John L. Bass wrote:
> 
>> You might be VERY vocal to your clients providers about the difficult
>> problems your clients are having with VPN access. It might provide some
>> balance to the very vocal P2P and gaming users that demand all you can eat.
> 
> I talked to a bunch of gamers a while back, all they wanted to talk to
> me about was "ping time", though they showed absolutely no indication
> that they had any idea what that might mean, not that it is any sort of
> official metric anyway.

In all the IDsoftware engines, it's actual latency of the UDP packets
they are measuring, but in the beginning, they called it "ping time"
(DOOM days) and it's just stuck.

And true, most gamers just know that if the "ping time" is consistently
high, game play suffers, and even if they have "good" ping time (less
than 50 ms), they know game play sucks bad if the "lagometer" shows the
ping time jumping all over the place.

So these guys have a base understanding of both latency and jitter, they
just don't know that's what networking guys call it.  ;-)

Regards,
Mike

PS: I was one of those gamer guys John speaks of, although I was careful
to not cause network floods...  the games I played had flow control knobs.

-- 
Michael Milligan                                   -> milli at acmeps.com