JOSEPH CUMELLO GAMING & ESPORTS
GAMING & ESPORTS: MAJOR PLAYERS IN NETWORK DESIGN
With the Covid-19 pandemic forcing vast numbers of people across the world to stay indoors, often for months on end, a huge spike in network traffic was inevitable. While there has been an increase in services such as streaming movies, businesses have been making much greater use of video conferencing and families meeting via the likes of Skype and Zoom. However, a significant proportion of the increase is down to gaming and esports traffic, which according to Verizon, increased by 75% in the US during March of this year. Optical Connections editor Peter Dykes asked Ciena’s CMO Joseph Cumello , himself an online gamer, how this increase in traffic was impacting on networks now and in the future.
Is this increase in esports and gaming traffic just a result of lockdown, or is there something
the immersion versus the one-way experience when it comes to entertainment and I think that’s the huge shift in behaviour that’s driving this.
that latency has a lot to do with whether or not you have a successful outcome. So, whether you’re a network provider or a gaming company, what you’re trying to do is push the cloud engine, the data centre engine or whatever is driving the gaming platform, closer and closer to the edge. The closer the cloud gaming intelligence is to the user, the lower the latency can be especially, of course, if the core transport network is fibre. So how networks react to that depends on a couple of new technologies out there. Firstly, there’s route optimisation and assurance, the so-called software automation technology. This looks for congestion points in the network and
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more fundamental going on?
How can networks respond to surges in traffic generated by things like esports and online
What I believe is happening is that the generations that are coming up believe that an immersive
JC
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gaming?
entertainment experience is more enriching than a one-way experience, such as watching TV or a movie. Gaming has become so rich, it’s becoming immersive. There are games out there where you can immerse yourself in the narrative and be part of that narrative. And I think that this is the reason why we’re seeing this change. People want
There are multiple pieces of that problem. The first is when you’re talking about actual gaming, as
JC
opposed to streaming. The gaming experience itself requires a very low latency experience, especially if you’re competing, and what folks are finding is
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| ISSUE 21 | Q3 2020
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