How the VPN industry is creating its stake in online gaming

techcrunch.com

6 points·prostoalex··7 comments

VPNs can sometimes help with lag/consistent ping if the VPN provider is on a non-congested (at the ISP) back-haul carrier but the game servers are.

Tunneling encrypted traffic through your ISP to a data center improves performance vs. going straight from your endpoint to the other endpoint. Stop and consider this for a moment.

The fact that this is so often the case points to either BGP peering being totally f'd at ISPs or deep packet inspection and traffic prioritization / de-prioritization algorithms mucking everything up.

I personally suspect the latter since at ZeroTier we've noticed that direct P2P performance is sometimes (for some ISPs) more consistent when the traffic is flowing over ZeroTier than "naked." This simply should not be. If anything encapsulation should have the opposite effect. My guess would be that the DPI traffic manglers don't know what to do with encrypted UDP traffic so they just send it on through.

Don't worry, eventually the monopolists will figure out how to make you pay up or suffer, as well.

Hmm... this is "QoS as a Service" (QaaS?) But how can you deliver QoS if you are not the ISP??? Perhaps it is a "pure marketing" play where they aim to show a market for QoS-for-$ then sell the brand and customer base to the ISPs?

Years ago there was a short lived VPN service that tried just that. Making sure their service was on non congested optimal routes to game servers. But it didn't really take off, I assume because of that reason. All they could offer was what your ISP should hopefully be doing in the first place but nothing more.

Years ago ISPs may have been less evil than they are now.

So basically GameRail was before it's time.

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