nbn, gaming development and understanding the network ecosystem
From Catherine Campbell, GM Network Partnerships, Networks, nbn
Periods of high internet traffic present unique challenges for broadband networks, with gaming and other data-intensive applications driving peak loads. For nbn, understanding and managing these surges is critical to delivering a stable, high-quality experience for Australian households and businesses.
This article explores how nbn collaborates with gaming publishers to address the impact of bursty data surges, which dominate peak network usage. (And what role Quake 3 Arena played in it!) It also highlights nbn’s innovations aimed at improving customer satisfaction and gaming performance across Australia, ensuring a seamless digital experience during times of heightened demand, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the wholescale, national, State and local changes that came with it are still fresh in the mind of many of us. The ongoing impacts of that time in our social, political and work lives are still acutely felt and lived, as we shape what a ‘COVID normal’ world looks like.
For nbn, the onset of the pandemic and the policies that followed profoundly changed application use across the nbn network, especially across video conferencing and gaming applications. Let’s have a look at how nbn worked with gaming publishers to manage massive bursty data surges, and how our innovation programs will help deliver improved customer satisfaction and gaming performance across Australia.
nbn has not always had the best relationship with the gaming industry. With the declaration of the network as built and fully operational, nbn was able to shift focus from a network perspective of its service – that is, get the network built, get it connected to people and companies in the fastest way possible against strict performance measures – to an “Over The Top” perspective – that is, how can we support the companies delivering products and services over the network, and what can we do to make sure that everyone is having the best possible digital experience.
This has allowed us to focus on upgrading services, flipping premises from legacy copper technologies to full fibre solutions via nbn Fibre to the Premises and importantly, educating the public on what kinds of speeds and what kinds of connections work well for the smoothest, fastest and most stable experience of digital products and services they buy, like games.
Gaming and nbn – But why…?
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia really brought the importance of our relationship with the gaming industry home – not just for nbn, but to every wholesale provider across the globe.
As a wholesale network company, nbn manage, monitor and support broadband data use across Australia. We have an acute understanding of when and how the nbn network will likely come under heavier use, and make sure that both nbn as a wholesaler and our Retail Service Partners are equipped to be able to manage significant network loads and traffic profiles.
There are two significant elements to traffic profiles – baseload traffic and bursty traffic. Baseload traffic is made up of the kinds of applications that we expect to see everyday on the network – work related applications during the day, transitioning to entertainment and socialization applications like streaming and gaming into the evening. This pattern creates the classic usage as below:
Bursty traffic is where things get interesting. Bursty events and driven primarily by gaming patch updates, and are responsible for over 95% of nbn’s peak throughput records. Gaming is an essential and powerful element of the nbn throughout tapestry.
Pre-Covid, these events were relatively easy to manage. When ‘Stay Home’ policy implementation swept across Australia, and that baseload significantly increased as people managed their whole lives from home, so did the relative impact of bursty traffic that arrived on top of that increased baseload. This led to a significant increase in network utilisation across Australia.
Breaking this down, we can see in this chart how application use shifted during this time. While streaming and Web Services continued to make up the bulk of the baseload, the real story here is the exceptional growth in gaming.
Gaming came out during this time as the big commercial growth opportunity, with a 39% and 51% growth in Gaming activities across March and April respectively, and still 14% higher than our predicted baseline in May.
During this time, people came together through games. The people who already had the habit of streaming with their friends or watching their favorite shows didn’t necessarily change that behaviour during this time, on top of this was a good proportion of the population that added themselves to that demographic as they couldn’t engage in their usual evening routine. What we saw though, was that Gaming was also added to that evening routine, with consoles Australia wide being found and dusted off, updated and played again and local online marketplaces became a hive of local game swap-and-sell activity.
Network impacting gaming what now?
Across the network, in the downstream, nbn saw a 63% increase in daytime traffic, and a 16% increase in evening peak traffic. Again, the daytime traffic was easy to predict, as people transitioned to working and learning from home its easy to see how that would increase. Daytime increases were not a problem to provision for, given that they were still on par or lower with usual evening peak. The evening increase of 16% baseload is the metric to watch – as we discussed before, baseloads are important for our ability to manage bursty peaks.
So, what does bursty traffic look like on top of this heightened baseload? Well, when a major gaming patch would drop, usually deployed during Australian peak time, you could add another 15% throughput to that increased baseload. Month on month we were breaking throughput records for the nbn network.
For a more in depth discussion on how data patterns and usage changed, you can read “The Impacts of COVID-19 Response Measures on Australian Broadband Traffic on the nbn Network”.
That experience of managing sudden, bursty traffic across a bloated baseload, along with the incredible industry partnerships that were forged in this time to manage this data and ensure stable customer experience highlighted the critical role that network conditions have in delivering digital products and services.
Translating network learning to real, digital product support
Over the past few years, nbn has embarked on a series of internal studies to better understand how different kinds of network interference or degradation affects Gaming customer experience.
Gaming experience is a complex and intricate thing to understand and measure. There are many elements that need to be taken into consideration, like what elements of your experience can be attributed to:
- Jitter
- Packet loss
- Latency
- Your skill
- Competitors skill
- Fatigue
- Input response
- Other factors (game issues, hardware issues, etc.)
It is a surprisingly hard and complex question. It is also, despite the cries from Folk Engineering, not well studied or defined. So, we put science to work and looked a little closer at this subjective experience of network performance and gaming experience, and what the minimum network requirements might be for optimal performance.
As this work began during the height of COVID-19 management stay home policies, the first wave of this work was done using a range of differently provisioned AI bots playing Quake 3 Arena. These bots were assigned different conditions – a high latency bot, a high jitter bot, a packet loss bot and an nbn Ultra-Fast fibre perfect conditions bot. These bots were tested against kills per round and ability to learn and adapt to the network conditions they were given.
Initial results were quite fascinating. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that how one builds and designs a game has a deep impact on customer experience. Thinking about building games for an international audience, and ensuring that they can be played regardless of location or network conditions, this makes sense – games can be built to the lowest common denominator. For Quake 3 Arena, it turns out that packet loss does not have a major impact on gaming experience, as it is designed to send multiple, identical packets at one time. If a single or multiple packets is lost it has no impact – the other identical packets will get through. Latency came out as the highest customer experience impacting network condition in our initial study.
Latency, Digital products, consumer choice, oh my!
The two major factors that can cause latency across the nbn network are speed and network load. If you are in a busy household that spends time using multiple simultaneous high impact applications, whether that be general web use, streaming, or working from home then it’s likely that you have a high network load household. Latency is the time that it takes for data to pass from one point to another in a network – which means, the faster that data is allowed to travel, the less time it will take and the less latency you will experience. The hypothesis is that the more data you want to transfer, the faster you have to go to make sure all those packets leave and arrive in time for you to experience seamless internet[1].
Network stability and capability is also an important factor. The hypothesis here is that there is no point in having superfast data speed if it’s trying to move through an older line or technology which can, through pure physics, slow you down. Nor is there any point in having high speed internet to your home if it hits a wifi or in-home system that is limited and slowing your experience down.
We put science to work a little more and tested this too. Over the past year, we have set up a series of subjective, experiential tests where we have gamers play Quake 3 Arena against each other, simulating different speed tiers with the same ‘network load’ behind them – that of two devices playing 4k Netflix streams.
What we have found so far is an exceptional snapshot of human subjectivity and resilience. Humans are incredibly adept at adapting to change, and network conditions are something that any of us who have been playing online since the dial-up era can attest to being very good at adjusting for. Our adaptability is so second nature, that participants starting on the low speed station often did not believe there was any latency present until they moved over to and experienced the high speed station.
At that point, they would feel the difference immediately. This is the hardest thing to bring to life about speed tiers and customer experience – there is a personal journey that most people need to experience to understand the impact exceptional internet service makes. Just as it was hard to convince people they needed ADSL over dialup until they felt the difference, then modern broadband over ADSL, then 50 or 100 Mbps over 25/5, we are now asking people to come with us on a journey and experience the productivity, life and experiential changes gig plans can have for you and your family as you engage with the digital products and services we have all come to rely on.
What next?
In collaboration with UTS through nbn’s ASTRID program, we are preparing to conduct a large, live gamer test of these hypothesis. We have some exceptional Industry partners standing beside us, and hope to give the gaming industry true insights into how their products traverse the nbn, how we can continue to design and manage the network to provide the optimum experience for everyone, and to ensure the Industry understands the nbn well enough to optimally design their games to create a better Customer Experience for everyone.
[1] End customer experience, including the speeds actually achieved over the nbn network, depends on the nbn access technology and configuration over which services are delivered to the customer’s premises, whether they are using the internet during the busy period, and some factors outside of nbn’s control (like the customer’s equipment quality, software, chosen broadband plan or how their provider designs its network). For nbn Fixed Wireless, speeds may also be impacted by the number of concurrent users on the nbn Fixed Wireless network, including during busy periods. For nbn Satellite, customers may also experience latency.