COVID-19 vs. our Networks

Sat Mar 14 10:24:16 UTC 2020

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020, at 04:31, Darin Steffl wrote:
> Playing games doesn't take much bandwidth. Downloading games does. So 
> as long as everyone already has their games and there's no updates, 
> playing the game is typically under 100 kbps which is negligible 
> compared to streaming video which takes 1 to 25 mbps. 

My experience at $job[$now] (IXP) and $job[-1] (ISP with residential users) show otherwise. ISP-side traffic comes inbound from ASNs hosting gaming platforms, and IXP-side, gaming platforms have no issues taking 100G ports and pushing lots of traffic on them. Ratio-wise, they seem very much "heavy outbound". When new games are released, we see extra traffic from CDNs. Even if a game does not generate much traffic, in a MMO context every user pushes one data stream but receives several ones. And there may be reasons (avoiding cheats) where traffic pushed from the gaming platform contains more then each user's actions.
IMO, it depends on how game handles inter-player communication. I do recall playing some serverless networked games some 15-20 years ago, with 3 players each on their own ADSL or cable, and the upstream (in the 512-800 Kbps range) never getting saturated.