With pandemic-related lockdowns resulting in South Africans keeping to their homes, a growing number are turning to gaming as a form of entertainment, or even a livelihood, as can be seen with professional gamers. To give them an advantage, Integrated ICT and infrastructure provider Vox has launched Gaming Essentials, a quality-of-service feature that ensures a superior connectivity experience for local gamers.

“Today’s homes now have multiple devices connected to the Internet as different family members engage in working online using cloud-based services, surf the Web and watch YouTube videos, and stream series or movies off Netflix — all at the same time. This can have a negative impact on gaming traffic, and ultimately the gaming experience,” says Andrew King, head of product: voice, visual communications and gaming at Vox.

According to King, Gaming Essentials — only available to Vox fibre-to-the-home customers — includes proprietary gaming-specific configurations added to a service provider-grade Mikrotik router on the customer’s premises that minimises jitter and eliminates latency spikes due to buffering under high load. By prioritising UDP traffic — the traffic type used by most modern games, this quality-of-service feature shields gaming traffic from other Internet traffic on the household’s network, reducing latency for gamers.

“This is critical when playing online or multiplayer first-person shooter games,” he says. Enabling the optimisation of gaming traffic on your local network can be key, as the slightest bit of latency can be the difference between you placing first or your opponent winning the game. The lower your ping and latency, the smoother, more responsive and lag-free your gameplay is. Gaming traffic isolation also means that you won’t experience latency spikes when someone in the house starts watching a YouTube video, for example.”

Hassle-free Internet

For the configuration to work properly, you will need to forgo a small portion of your line speed (1Mbit/s on links less than 50Mbit/s, and 2Mbit/s on 50Mbit/s or faster links). Your gaming traffic will flow over a dedicated portion of your link, unaffected by other Internet traffic flowing over the same link. Furthermore, with the router being controlled by a centralised management server, Vox can remotely configure the device so that you always get to enjoy the best experience possible on your specified device, regardless of you upgrading or downgrading your link over time.

“Vox’s Gaming Essential QoS can give local gamers the edge over the competition with improved real-time gaming, particularly on lower-speed links — all while the rest of the family gets to enjoy hassle-free Internet, without their streaming or your gaming being affected,” says King.

Taking gaming to more South Africans

King says Vox is looking to make quality gaming more accessible and affordable to South Africans with multiple offerings, including latency-optimised Internet connectivity (with fibre the primary choice for gamers), affordable access to the latest generation of gaming consoles from Microsoft, and now Gaming Essentials.

“We have also introduced a streaming relay service for PC users who have a Vox FTTH subscription. Traditionally, local gamers had to stream at low resolution — often at 480p. By using the Vox service, they can stream in high definition, increasing views and gaining more subscribers and followers. This is made possible by streaming to the local Vox edge server, which then relays the stream — at much higher resolution — to the relevant global platform, be it Twitch, Vimeo or YouTube.

“All of these offerings together are aimed at aiding and enabling our customers, and to ensure that they get to enjoy a superior gaming experience.”