CreativDeveloper's Blog

My primary provider (which shall remain nameless, for it has provided me with years of excellent service prior to the recent descent into the proverbial tech-latrine) had finally pushed me to the limits of my patience, and I found myself in the market for a replacement.

Now, Anyone who  has had to change ISP’s in our dear country is aware of the headaches of sub-Saharan Africa and the Internet- you have the GSM providers on one hand, with their wide coverage and good speeds due to recent flirtations with 3G,EDGE and HSDPA. Providers who, due to their primary desire to preserve their more valuable property (overpriced cellphone calls and SMS) impose ridiculous download caps with varied (but uniformly ugly) penalties for overshooting said limits- anything from summary disconnection to 15x to 30x price hikes.

On another hand, you have the CDMA providers, who are not (usually) as protective of their bandwidth, and offer the promise of good speeds and coverage due to widespread deployment of EVDO, but rarely deliver due to oversaturated networks and where they do deliver, usually mask high latencies behind their equally high speeds (buh?! Latency??? What that?!??!  If you really want to play games online, you owe it to yourself to find out what this is, so read on!)

And then you have the oddballs. Wimax, Cable modem providers, etc etc. Unified by a universal trade off: High setup costs versus horrible performance.

So far, the outlook is pretty bleak. Picking one from this lot is a tough (and expensive) proposition. And as a gamer, there are other things to look for. You see, games don’t just demand speed. There are two other key features (bear with me here, grammar wan begin plenty):

1. Latency: Unfortunately, no provider in Nigeria (to my knowledge) offers information on latency. It’s just a trial-and-error game of chance. So whats the difference between latency and bandwidth? Well this is the best way to explain it: if bandwidth is the speed at which netjuice pours through your internet pipe, latency is the time it takes for the flow to get to you. In other words, you may have a download of 100kbps, but a latency delay of 2000 ms (2 seconds). This means that in GEARS OF WAR, there will be a full four seconds between the time you pull the trigger, and the time your gun begins to fire. Not good.
2. NAT reachability: For whatever reason, both xbox live and playstation Network require us to perform some settings known as port forwarding in order to connect. Port forwarding is out of the scope of this article, but what we need to know is that some providers do not allow this, and anyone trying to game on such networks, regardless of latency and bandwidth, is SOL (sh*t out of luck)

With all the above, it’s pretty obvious that the most reliable source of information, besides blind random luck, would have to be a recommendation from a friend. Unfortunately, since many people are masters in the art of denial, and can happily spend hours playing an unplayable, jerking, lag-ridden session online mainly due to a stubborn refusal to accept the fact that ‘dem money don burn finish’ (thousands of Naira down the drain- tra la la….), I have had people make the most insane recommendations, both on and offline! Eventually I just came to the conclusion that since the SAT-3 (West Africa’s premier link to the civilised world) is unable to deliver the needed low latency, Nigerian gamers should just be content to lug their systems across the nation and be done with it.

2. Second things second: A ray of hope!