Comcast is unveiling ultra-low lag connectivity when it comes to highly interactive applications like gaming, video conferencing and virtual reality. It can bring down interaction delays as much as 75%.
Comcast has partnered with Apple, Nvidia (and its GeForce Now cloud gaming) and Valve on its Steam game platform. The good thing for consumers: It will come at no extra cost for Comcast Xfinity Internet subscribers and it will be rolling out to millions of eligible homes in the first quarter.
The new technology will help get rid of lag, or interaction delays that can cost you victory in a fast-action shooter game or a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game. This is something I’ve written about for years, but it always seemed like a fleeting problem. Comcast believes it can cut lag (or interaction delays) from hundreds of milliseconds down to 22 to 25 milliseconds, said Jason Livingood, vice president of technology policy, product & standards at Comcast, in an interview with GamesBeat.
With the launch, Comcast’s Xfinity Internet latency will be dramatically reduced to faster than the blink of an eye, particularly when using FaceTime on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro, Nvidia’s GeForce Now cloud gaming service, or many games on Valve’s Steam games platform.
If you’re an esports star or a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player, you’re going to really care about this improvement. I would probably have more fun in Call of Duty as well. And fans of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 should have a field day.
“Our connectivity is the key to unlocking a world of entertainment, sports, news and information and we’re constantly pushing the limits of network innovation to create an experience that exceeds the expanding demands of our customers,” said Emily Waldorf, SVP of consumer products at Comcast Connectivity and Platforms, in a statement. “Modern applications are real-time and interactive and require more than just fast speeds. Xfinity Internet’s lower lag times will be a differentiator for Comcast.”
With low-lag internet, Comcast is breaking new ground on technology that will help to ensure its customers can take advantage of everything the internet has to offer today and into the future. Latency-sensitive applications will experience less delay, and a smoother, more responsive end-to-end online experience compared to other options like 5G home Internet, where the network gets bogged down and the connection deteriorates when a lot of people are online, Comcast said.
Back in October 2023, Comcast started delivering high-speed bandwidth upload and download speeds of 2GBS in homes with its cable modem service, but bandwidth isn’t the problem for gamers, said Livingood.
Initially, customers will see the benefits of the new technology firsthand when the Apple, Nvidia and Valve products. Comcast’s low-lag experience will expand as additional content and application providers leverage the new technology for their own products. When fully deployed it will be available to all Xfinity Internet customers.
Comcast has been testing low latency technology with its user groups for the past year and those tests have met or even exceeded expectations. The initial rollout began and will expand to cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Colorado Springs, Philadelphia, Rockville (Maryland) and San Francisco, deploying in more locations across the country rapidly over the next few months.
Initially the features will be available on the XB6, XB7 and XB8 models of the Xfinity Gateway. Additional leased and retail modems will be added in the future as the software on those devices begin to support the new technology.
Low-lag Internet is made possible by Comcast’s state-of-the-art network, which has been built to deliver an exceptional Internet experience, ubiquitously, to the more than 63 million homes and businesses across the country.
“We’re moving beyond bandwidth to lots of other factors that, especially for gaming, affect the user experience,” Livingood said.
One reason is that Comcast has upgraded its equipment, including the boxes in your homes, to meet standards such as IETF, DOCSIS and more to enable the new low-latency tech. Basically, gamers care about ping time, or the time it takes for a signal to go out to a server on the internet and then come back. Ping time is lower the more people in the house are using the internet.
If one is watching Netflix and another is playing Call of Duty multiplayer, the gamer may see images start to stutter or get blurry. The ping time can shoot up to 300 milliseconds and come back down, and that kind of variability is also not good for a multiplayer game.
“We are dramatically lowering the average (working) latency,” Livingood said. “What we’re able to do with this new form of low latency networking is bring that working latency down to almost the same as idle latency. We’re lowering that working latency about 75% for our users, which is huge. And not only is that lower, but it’s consistently lower.”
He said the jitter, the variability of latency, just goes away.
“It’s just consistently low. And so you’re going to see that that ping time be a lot more constant. It becomes totally seamless and smooth, and you’re not getting the glitches in the video conferences and and these kind of things,” Livingood said.
The low lag works in locations that are using the Comcast’s virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS), a software-based tech that connects the internet to consumer’s homes. It’s a key part of Comcast’s distributed access architecture (DAA).
“It’s leveraging the software that we have running on home gateways,” Livingood said.
He said that Comcast has been quietly deploying the tech in some cities and it is in about a million homes now. It will be in the millions of homes by the end of the first quarter, Livingood said. The new tech is based on an open standard and it becomes more valuable to more people as more app developers adopt it.
Comcast will eventually do a marketing push around the tech when it is more widely rolled out. The vCMTS tech is present in a lot of the 63 million homes across the country.
“From our standpoint, making it available just as a part of the service was a way to make it reach as broad a user base as broad as possible, to attract as much developer interest as possible,” Livingood said.
Valve enables various forms of cloud gameplay as well, enabling you to play better games on a device that normally wouldn’t be able to run them.
There are certain kinds of games that can benefit from running in the cloud. Dubbed cloud native, the biggest one launched this year is Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Compared to the release in 2020, this is a much bigger and more realistic game. The 2024 version has 4,000 times more detail on the ground than the 2020 version, and runs mostly in the cloud. Back in 2020, it could take 450GB of storage to store all of the various pieces of the game. Now, in 2024, Microsoft can run it with just 50GB on the local machine. But it requires a good connection to the cloud data center, as Microsoft learned in the buggy version of the launch back in November.
This kind of game would thrive based on the new Comcast tech, and you’ll be able to fly around the world without having to worry that the scenery would be slow to load. Back in 2020, I could remember flying over the San Francisco Bay and recall seeing only half the San Mateo Bridge. The rest of it popped in as it fetched the memory of the mapped area from the cloud.
In short, we’ll get better realism and faster interaction with this technology. Livinggood said that you’ll do better with a cable modem connection than a fixed wireless or 5G solution.
“We’ve been just iteratively working to get that latency to be lower and lower,” he said. “I think one of the takeaways is that, you know, as I like to say, we’re kind of in the post gigabit era. You know, once you have hundreds of megabits per second or a gigabit per second, it’s not the bandwidth is not your constraint for user quality anymore. You can have one gig connection and still have a crummy cloud gaming experience, or crummy Google Meet session, because it’s a latency problem.”
The solution is “active queue management.” This is the kind of classic traffic control where the software can look for different types of flows. If you’re downloading info, it may not be as important as a real-time action game. The action game traffic would be prioritized so it doesn’t get interrupted. And the flow of a Netflix film could be slowed and dealt with so the viewing experience is not choppy. The big leap forward is the new IETF L4S standard, which sets the rules for low-latency, low-loss scalable throughput.
“In the past, the networking standards always thought that you had to make a trade off between high bandwidth and low delay, and you could pick one or the other. You couldn’t have both high bandwidth and low delay. And this IETF standard basically said you can have both of these things at the exact same time, and the way that you do that is we’re going to add a second network queue at any of the typical performance bottlenecks,” Livingood said.
In short, it’s a shallow queue, where your packets don’t have to wait for a long time.
“We’re not in an era where bandwidth is scarce anymore. Bandwidth is abundant and and you still have latency problems. And so that caused the network community really at the IETF and elsewhere, but mostly at the IETF to say, if it’s not a bandwidth problem, and we’ve been pursuing this prioritization for a while, then what else is it? And that’s where they gravitated to this new standard,” Livingood said.
