NBN Co has released a new video series aimed at gamers called The Ping.
It’s part of NBN Co’s strategy to teach Australians about how it delivers the back-end infrastructure for Australian fibre internet. Three episodes have been produced in the series, each covering a different topic that would be important to gamers, however, I think there’s a lot of value in these episodes for non-gamers as well.
“We want to ensure gamers are enjoying a next-level experience on the NBN network. Digital game downloads are expected to dominate sales of gaming titles over the coming years, so we’re growing the network to stay ahead of overall demand,” NBN Co general manager for customer experience Mark Vanston said.
“We’re doing that through network investment and upgrades. More than 5.1 million premises throughout Australia are now eligible to access wholesale plan speeds of 500 Mbps to close to 1Gbps. For example, at those speeds of close to 1Gbps, a gaming update around 50GB could download in minutes instead of hours.”
The first episode, The internet explained, goes into the history of the internet and how it works, from content servers to ISPs to the NBN itself. It also discusses how things like ping and ‘packets’ actually work, with some terrific infographics all the way throughout (along with some renders that are very clearly trying to rip off League of Legends and Starcraft 2).
Props to NBN Co for this, by the way, this is really well produced and I think it’s a useful tool in teaching web infrastructure literacy to people who might not know that much about the internet.
Having played many games with people online over the past 14 years (since I was ten, thank you Runescape) there’s always been a bit of confusion about how servers actually work. Why they become overloaded, slow to connect to or routed too poorly is something that causes a fair amount of head-scratching in gaming spaces, including for myself.
Thankfully, the second video in the series Host in the machine: Game servers explained addresses this directly and clearly.
The last episode, Hardwired to win: How to help optimise your router, is generally useful for everyone. Routers (commonly referred to as modems or more accurately modem-routers) can be a pain to work with, but this video makes it really easy to understand how you can make them work as well as possible.
“Upload speeds are equally important for improving your latency and ping, and checking your internet set up is optimised will help to reduce factors that could impact your speed and performance,” added Vanston.
Not to cut NBN Co’s grass or anything, but we have some pretty sweet tips on how to make your NBN plan faster as well.
Credit where it’s due though, these videos rule. If you’re already across the inner workings of the internet, then they probably don’t offer much value to you. But if you have friends or family that are confused about how the internet works, then these videos could be useful to them (especially if they’re gamers).
Will this series stop gamers complaining about the NBN? Look, probably not, but it’s all interesting, valuable information.