Internet and esports or network issues which appeared by global quarantine
Author: Hawk Live LLC
Last updated:
The COVID-19 affected all spheres of human life. The global economy collapsed and people lost their jobs. Many people were locked at their houses, without an opportunity to travel, or even move freely inside the country.
Limits and bans on holding mass events have put an end to the organization of many types of sports. But esports was in a much better position - a lot of organizations and players were able to keep their jobs.
As LAN tournaments were temporarily unavailable, game developers and tournament organizers concentrated on online competitions and it paid off.
Amount of views of esports competitions has increased, various leagues and new tournaments created one by one. But there were no international games with grandiose scale and prize pool.
There are several reasons for this.
Ping
The first and the main problem for the international cyberport was ping - the time it takes for the signal to reach the server and return back. In some cases this problem is not that important, but sometimes it’s terrible.
For example, teams from North America could play in Europe, but for them this experience was like torture.
Due to the geographical location of the game servers, any changings in the match was much faster for the European teams. It’s giving them a colossal advantage.
Obviously, in such conditions, there was no question about holding a tournament between teams from different parts of the world. Quarantine dictates its own rules, and information technology dictates its own.
Thus, the esports world was divided into three closed geographic zones:
- Europe and CIS
- China and Southeast Asia
- North America and South America
Each such zone included two regions which could play with each other without ping problems. But often they also split into their own local «parties». The speed of Internet connections simply was not enough for comfortable competition between teams from different parts of the world.
Internet quality
The distance was not the only problem, the quality of the network infrastructure also had huge effects.
Situation in the economically developed regions was better. Europe, China and North America have not any particular problems. Cases with no opportunity to start or continue the game due to technical problems, were the exception rather than the rule.
In fairness, it should be said that not everything is perfect here either. So, for example, between some countries of the European Union or the CIS, with the same geographical distance, the signal delay can differ significantly.
Gamers from South America and Southeast Asia had the hardest time. There are several reasons, and they all complement each other.
Geographical difficulties - laying of Internet communications in mountainous or oceanic terrain, which entails low qualified methods of cabling and violation of technological requirements.
Service price - oceanic and mountainous terrain makes it difficult to lay communications, complicates their structure and, as a result, increases the cost.
Congestion - Despite plans to increase the ability of Internet communications, no one fully calculated the consequences of the quarantine. People lost their jobs at home or started working from home, which increased the load on the network.
Climate - due to weather conditions in the equatorial zone and the southern hemisphere, communications are often disrupted.
Over time, the countries realized that the situation would not change in the near future, and began to solve problems. After all, it wasn’t just about esports.
Problems of closed local esports
Esports itself also had its own problems, which, unfortunately, cannot be solved under quarantine conditions.
After the transition to online, the audience at broadcasts in various eSports disciplines has grown significantly. People sat at home and watched games, and views on Twitch increased significantly.
Such an influx of audience to streaming sites has had a positive impact on their development. Official games of your region at a convenient time for you, isn't the save during the quarantine period?
However, good things don't last forever.
Gradually stagnation began to form. The competition has declined, the audience becoming tired of the games.
It seemed that the teams were simply bored. The experience that could be obtained when playing with opponents from other regions was not available.
We'll write in more detail about the problems of esports and how to solve them in a separate article. Now let's take a look at how the world is solving problems with Internet communications at the moment.
Development of Internet communications
Despite the reliability of the current Internet connections, at critical moments they were unable to provide uninterrupted access to the network. Governments and private companies began to accelerate the development and implementation of new, alternative types of wire and mobile communications, as well as to improve and develop existing ones. Some of them have already proven themselves and went into exploitation.
4G and 5G
There are many cases when even a professional esports player was saved from a lost match by a mobile network. So what about a casual player who, for any reason, played on a notebook via a modem.
4G is now generally available in developed countries. The advantages of the new mobile information transfer standards are obvious. This is a great solution in cases where there is no possibility of a direct connection to the wired Internet or Wi-Fi. It is also a fairly reliable reserve option in case when the Internet is needed here and now.
But even the 4G network, which is not yet available in every country, is already fading into the background, yielding the primacy to 5G.
Key benefits of 5G over 4G:
- Speed
- Delay
- Bandwidth
The only thing where 5G is much inferior to its predecessor is coverage. There were also added problems caused by the massive hysteria of some groups of people blaming the 5G towers for the spread of COVID-19.
At the same time, do not forget that even in the most developed countries, 4G coverage is not 100%.
Subsea highways
High-speed highways are laid on the surface of the ocean floor and underground, while users are waiting for the opportunity to fully play "over the air" at high speeds. The importance of such projects can hardly be overestimated, because thanks to them an enormous amount of information is transferred between continents.
Dunant
Last year, Google launched its own internet cable between the United States and Chile. The cable was named Curie, in honor of Maria Sklodowska-Curie, a physicist who became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1903.
At the same time, Havfrue cables were commissioned in the North Atlantic and HK-G (Hong Kong-Guam) in Asia, Australia and the Pacific region.
In early 2021, Google announced that the Dunant subsea cable was ready to go. The second subsea cable of the IT giant, which was announced in 2018, named after Henri Dunant, the initiator of the creation of the international humanitarian organization Red Cross, the first Nobel Peace Prize in history.
This cable laid along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean from Virginia beach in the United States, where two large data centers are located, to the Atlantic coast in France, and then to Belgium.
The highway is notable for being the first high-haul subsea cable with 12-pair space division multiplexing optical fiber. The increased cable throughput is provided just by the additional pairs of fibers and the addition of repeaters with power optimization.
In this way, Google is expanding its infrastructure and meeting user demand for high-speed Internet connection between USA and Europe. At the moment this route is the most demanded one.
EllaLink
In parallel with Google, which is laying the USA-Europe route, EllaLink is engaged in an equally ambitious project. The main objective of the project is to create a direct highway bypassing the United States to connect South America with Europe.
The cable has already been laid between Portugal and Brazil. A full launch was made on June 1, 2021, with a signal ping of about 60ms. This is already enough, if not for a tournament, then at least for a comfortable game between continents.
According to Epic Esports Events Product Director Mark «March3llo» Averbukh, he has already been approached by several South American teams to take part in tournaments on European servers.
We hope that in the near future the problem with the Internet connection and high ping between continental America and Europe will disappear completely.
Starlink
From the underwater depths, change gaze upward to the stars. SpaceX is already in full swing preparing its satellite Internet project, Starlink, for full operation.
Now the US, Canada and the UK are already using space Internet services. Several countries will be added to the list in the near future.
At the end of September, SpaceX plans to launch another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit, thus increasing their number to 1,800. In total, it is planned to launch 30 thousand satellites, which in the near future should provide the entire planet with broadband Internet. And Elon Musk's team is systematically moving towards its goal.
Waiting for decisions
The pandemic not only revealed holes in the health care system of even the most developed countries, but also showed that the current level of network infrastructure is obsolete. People did not become richer, a large number of new connection points to the network did not appear, only the tasks and the average time of the connection window changed, but this was enough for the system to stop coping.
It is not known who will solve this problem: the state, a private owner on state grants, an enterprising billionaire or someone unknown from the digital economy segment economy. But thanks to him, we will get a full-fledged field for international e-sports battles, which will undoubtedly breathe new life into many electronic disciplines.
