A Test of Bandwidth

I thought I'd do a little bit of testing today.

Before I do though - Happy Mothers Day to all the Moms out there ! Sleepymum called earlier, she's ok and is enjoying the flowers that came through via non contact "just pop it down there please" type protocols.

Bandwidth ?

There is a story going around at the moment that an EU individual has asked the video streaming service people to tone down how much bandwidth they use ... and that they've complied (It might start tomorrow).

The idea is that people watching Prime, Netflix or The Baby Yoda Channel are soaking up the bandwidth that's needed for emergency services. I'll get back to what I think of that later.

There was another story about online gaming people taking up the bandwidth too. I thought I'd test this ...

First up is Twitch streaming and the lovely Kaeyi this morning doing a stream of the new Animal Crossing game :

This was after roughly an hour of 720p streaming, which goes at a steady 3ish Mbits/s. An hour was 1.542GB. For this activity, the compression and video encoding is done on the fly, so it isn't as effective as when the encoding has more time. Fuzzy's stream at the moment is in 720p as well and it's going at about 6Mbit/s over on the laptop.

By on the fly, we mean that it's pictures and sound being captured at the source, encoded into a video stream and sent over the internet to multiple viewers in 0.95 seconds between my laptop and Fuzzy currently. That's ... pretty impressive.

Next up was Amazon Prime, with 46 minutes of Star Trek Picard :

So that's 2.332GB in 46 minutes, correcting up to the hour makes it 3.04GB or double what Twitch were doing for that Animal Crossing stream. This is for a video on demand service and it looks like a really inefficient one too. Prime's quality isn't up to the next candidate's quality. This is shocking actually, for a service looking to send out prerecorded video to millions of people, it should be as efficient and high quality as possible.

On to Youtube and an Aavak video on his latest Rimworld colony. Youtube tends to skip up and down on quality, depending on whether you're paying attention. This was a 1080p video, running for 50 minutes :

There we go, 709MB for 50 minutes or 850.8MB per hour. Youtube video from people like Aavak looks pixel sharp, especially when compared to what Prime were pushing out. It's packaged up (rendered) for efficiency by both the viewer producer and then by Youtube as well.

And Aavak makes good videos too. He has a lovely Welsh accented voice that's a pleasure to listen to.

As does the Fuzzy One and Nerina Pallot who is playing on the iTunes at the moment.

Last one - gaming ! I did a 3 hour session on Elite earlier and the stats came out to :

There we go ... 216MB for 3 hours, or 72MB per hour. That's probably a low level in terms of what traffic gets generated by multiplayer games. As you bounce from system to system, the game and servers will figure out what's there and send the info back. The Elite Dangerous Market Connector application is also sending information back and forth on what I find. There's been minimal contact between me and other pilots though and no voice comms. That would have boosted it a fair bit.

Voice comms won't be that much higher though. Voice needs a fraction of the bandwidth that is required by video and you can chop the quality back a lot before you lose the ability to understand the person on the other end of the cable.

The big reason is that the coordination in the gaming world is done by data, not by pictures. The game system will send across detailed information on what the entities in the game are doing and then the highly detailed environment is generated from that. I'm thinking that it probably resembles a list of chess moves. Player 1 is at x, y, z pointing a certain direction going a certain speed. Update that often and that should be what's needed. You don't really need to keep sending across the detailed information on what they look like.

Just like Elite won't send across pictures of the space stations as you orbit around them, it'll send across the design info which maps to the graphics toolkit I suspect they have and then the local game does the grunt work.

And then the game makes it look super pretty.

So what's the point of the testing ?

We're in a time where we're being asked to stay at home and be isolated. We're not really that set up to do that psychologically. Humans are very definitely herd people. Even us introverts like being on the outskirts of a community. We also need things to keep our minds busy.

Sure, if the emergency services need to take control of limited bandwidth, let them do that. I suspect it would be very easy for the Netflix's, Amazons and Baby Yoda Channel people to flick a switch and stop the video watching.

But we need our entertainment to help keep us sane. Keep the tap on until it is required to turn the tap off. Say NO to people who need to look as if they are having an impact on the situation, especially when that something is ill conceived, not thought out and more than a little daft. Slowing the video feeds or turning off the online games takes away a reason for people to find their entertainment from within their little bit of isolation. People bored because they can't play FIFA over the internet are more likely to go for a kickabout in the park.

It's dangerous. And it's another precedent.

That's getting near politics though, which I try not to get in to here.

I'm preferring to do my sightseeing in game (rather than outdoors around people).

It's been interesting staying in my little isolation place.

May need to click and zoom in a bit for the name there.

And another cheeky sunrise for the landing.

To close - keep doing what keeps you sane ! As long as it's paying a healthy respect to this virus that's going around. I'm hoping not to leave the house for around a week now. I'll be doing the work from home thing, keeping on with the online games (and the offline games), watching the streams and a little bit of video watching online.

Might be an idea to keep the dvds and blurays in reserve in case they do have to cut the Net/Prime quality down a bit though.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Addon - just seen this on the Twitters :

Click for the text.

Keep playing games, dust off the dvds, stay at home, be well.