In terms of games that blew out of proportion, you can’t miss PUBG– the online battle royale game that had users swarming in like crazy. If you are amongst the numerous PUBG players, there’s some good news for you. The popular esports title regardless of oddities had some of our national teams been able to achieve a place of their own in PUBG tournaments.
Finally, Nepal’s biggest ISP Worldlink which contributes to 10 Gbps of bandwidth out of our total bandwidth usage is testing a local PUBG server for Nepal. This isn’t the first time that Worldlink has done something like this, as previously Worldlink has installed 20 CDN servers for TikTok to eradicate the complaints regarding latency. Here’s what it means for you.
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What is CDN?
In order to fully understand what’s happening, you’ll have to know what CDN is. CDN stands for Content Delivery Network and it isn’t just another content hosting platform and doesn’t aim to replace web hosting but rather improves a website’s performance. There are plenty of grounds that it covers but let’s not indulge in that. Here, as in the case of PUBG- it means lower latency and a strong connection altogether or to put it into the language of PUBG- lower ping (ms).
Lower Latency?
Gamers would know how latency impacts the overall gameplay experience and in competitive esports titles like PUBG, it can be a win or lose decider. Using a distant server means delayed response time as the inputs take some time for the server to register and respond accordingly. Having a local server will minimize the traffic and overall response time. Tencent hasn’t mentioned which traffic it will handle but hopefully, this will make a significant difference. We’re saying hopefully, as there are only 2 nodes assigned for this task for testing and if the test is successful there will be 10 nodes for the task – we’ll be able to know if that actually made any difference at all.
Where do we currently stand?
Currently, the response that Nepali gamers receive is from one of the PUBG data centers located in Hongkong, Mumbai, Japan, etc. These servers handle the traffic but as we mentioned earlier, the response time isn’t as great as let’s say as someone connected to a local server would normally get.
What these locally added servers might bring?
These locally added servers might bring down the latency or the ping. While a ping below 100ms is respectable, for competitive gaming, 20ms or below is what we need to hit for the smooth gameplay experience we sought. Currently, Worldlink is carrying out its tests with 2 nodes assigned to the server. This hasn’t made that big a difference yet but Worldlink has planned to set up 10 nodes assigned to the server- and this might play a pivotal role in Nepali gaming.
Nevertheless, this is one great initiative to look forward to. While we do have to wait sometime before we see this in action, Worldlink has definitely stepped in the right direction and it might pave the way for budding gamers.
