MCI lands Sony gaming contract

MCI has expanded its service contract with Sony Online Entertainment, agreeing to provide high capacity links from SOE’s online gaming hubs to its IP backbone.

Sony has several regional hubs in the U.S. where it manages network-based games such as EverQuest and Planetside, multi-player games that allow thousands of gamers to interact at once. The growing service already has 500,000 customers with more signing up daily.

Though no financial details of the deal were revealed, MCI said it is providing high-bandwidth scalable capacity to each of Sony’s U.S. operations centers, allowing the company to deal immediately with unexpected surges in demand. While few of Sony’s online games are that bandwidth intensive for individual users, hundreds of thousands of users can be online at any given moment, requiring a massive amount of capacity at Sony’s servers, said Vint Cerf, MCI’s senior vice president of technology strategy.

"The servers have to be very responsive," Cerf said. "They have to handle millions of small requests at any given time. Sony is very careful and very technically savvy about what network they use. They have a sufficiently deep understanding of packet networks to keep us on our toes."

Since online gaming functions in real-time--a command issued by one player has to be carried across the entire network simultaneously--issues of latency and delay have become very important factors. Waiting a few extra milliseconds for a Web page to load or even a whole second or two to receive an e-mail is negligible. Even buffered streaming delayed by a few seconds produces few complaints. But in online gaming, participants are acting and reacting to others’ actions in real time. Any kind of packet loss or latency problem effectively drives the game to halt.

Cerf said MCI’s efforts in voice over IP have helped in its dealings with Sony. Like gaming, voice is a real time application and MCI has been optimizing its network for the new technology, planning to packetize all of its voice traffic by 2005. "Human beings time out very quickly," Cerf said, referring to delay in voice calls. "By configuring our network for VoIP we’ve been simultaneously configuring our network for all real-time applications."