Zero latency gaming

Massively multiplayer online games are a rapidly growing industry, increasingly involving both professional players and serious amateurs wanting premium performance from their gaming rigs.

The amount of latency experienced by gamers is a major source of irritation as they spend more time playing, and often also needing to communicate in real time with other players, over the internet.

Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay between my home and the server and has a direct impact on the time it takes from other players taking an action and that action appearing on my screen.

The main contributor of latency is the distance that the command needs to travel from the home network to the gaming company’s servers, which can be in another country.

To evolve our networks to enable gamers to get lower levels of latency, we are planning to use Multi-access Edge Computing to host applications virtually and therefore closer to customers.

We are currently exploring pilots to host servers for gaming companies on our networks. This could provide a premium gaming experience for Vodafone customers.

These planned trials will help Vodafone be ready for a future where customers are expected to play far more virtual reality and augmented reality games over fixed and mobile networks.A better understanding of wellbeing can assist people as they make life choices. Imran Kahn, the student from King’s College London who initiated the research project, has now joined Vodafone as a data scientist and in the future, we would like to expand this study to analyse human behavioural factors that play a role on wellbeing.