North American broadband networks observed an approximate 80% increase in the number of hosts using Xbox Live and an approximate 30% increase in Xbox Live traffic in the wake of Microsoft announcing over 20 new games [1] and a first-of-its-kind media downloading service [2].

Xbox Live hosts increase by 80%, led by the release of the game ‘Gears of War’

Xbox Live bandwidth consumption increased by almost 30%

On November 6, 2006 Microsoft announced the pending release of their new service for downloading high-definition TV shows and movies using the Xbox Live network. The following day Microsoft released six new Xbox games, including the highly anticipated ‘Gears of War’ which sold 1-million copies and rapidly climbed the ranks of online games to become the top played game on Xbox Live within its first two weeks of availability. Microsoft reported that “more than 850,000 unique gamers [had] engaged in 10 million gameplay sessions” of ‘Gears of War’ on Xbox Live by November 21 [3].

At the time this study concluded, November 27, Microsoft had released more than 18 additional games [4] and launched their TV and movie downloading service to the public [5].

This spike in Xbox Live traffic is reminiscent of Halo II’s release in 2004, which marked the first boom in online gaming and resulted in the sustainable popularity of Xbox Live. Microsoft states that Xbox Live now has 4 million members and expects to have 6 million members by June 2007 [6].

With the growing popularity of online gaming, it is evident that today’s best-effort networks are not well-suited to provide the consistent, high-quality services that subscribers expect. Applications such as gaming, VoIP (voice over IP) telephony, video telephony, and IPTV are easily affected by unpredictable jitter, latency, and packet loss that are characteristic of today’s broadband networks. Adding additional capacity and bandwidth does not solve the prblem, as bandwidth-hogging file sharing applications immediately consume all available bandwidth. Not only is this solution not feasible, continually adding new capacity is not cost-effective and simply does not resolve the underlying congestion issues that can unpredictably appear, particularly in the access network.

Using Sandvine’s deep-packet inspection (DPI) technology, service providers can choose from a suite of intelligent broadband network solutions that give them an early opportunity to identify subscriber usage trends for popular applications, and offer their subscribers a higher quality of experience for multimedia services by introducing new QoS-prioritized services.

Service providers can quickly understand gaming activity across their subscriber base using Sandvine Network Demographics reporting and then plan for better service delivery and targetted marketing. Sandvine’s broad identification of games and other applications ensure service providers are alerted to popular applications in advance, so they can offer proper QoS levels that enhance subscriber satisfaction.

Sandvine’s intelligent broadband network solutions offer a broad set of capabilities to identify application traffic and apply traffic policies that meet the service providers’ service goals and enhance subscribers’ online quality of experience.

Find out how much gaming traffic is on YOUR network; contact sales@sandvine.com.

Microsoft and Xbox are registered trademarks of Microsoft.

Sources:

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/nov06/11-06TVMovieDeliveryPR.mspx
[2] http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/gamegurus/thisweek/20061107.htm
[3] http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2006/1121-gearsofwar.htm
[4] http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/catalog.aspx
[5] http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2006/1106-moviestv.htm
[6] http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/2006/1106-moviestv.htm