According to Sandvine Inc, a Canadian broadband traffic management firm, Microsoft Xbox Live traffic almost quadrupled following Halo 2’s November 9 launch.
Halo 2 is a live, multi-player Xbox game that lets players from around the world do battle online connecting through broadband networks.
A recent report issued by Waterloo-based Sandvine expects the increasing popularity of online gaming to raise the bar for the hosting ISP’s quality of service, and is likely to become a competitive differentiator in the very near future.
Broadband industry pundits agree that ISPs will eventually be forced to reserve bandwidth specially for games like Halo 2 that are particularly latency-sensitive and feature rich.
