When quizzed on the plans by the company to upgrade their customers to 50Mbit lines, Virgin Media’s chief technology officer Howard Watson said:
“And gamers love it. You can shoot someone so much quicker at 50 megabits,”
What is wrong with this picture?
I mean, apart from the CTO of a major company describing “megabits” as the way to shoot people faster in a first person shooter video game. That, Mr Watson, would be a function of latency as opposed to bandwidth. Is Mr Watson promising much lower latency on their lines?
Stuart Cheshire wrote in “It’s the latency, Stupid” more than TEN YEARS AGO and yet the issues are the same:
Part of the problem here is misleading use of the word “faster”.
Being a customer of Virgin Media means “inconsistent” to me. Sometimes the latency will be really low, sometimes it’s going to be atrocious. Sadly the only times I want to play my online first person shooter games which demand low latency is when every other bugger is online which means my latency shoots into the stratosphere. You’ll notice this too in line noise in Skype or excessive delays with other audio/video conferencing.
I find it therefore horrifying but ultimately unsurprising that the CTO of Virgin Media doesn’t seem to know his arse from his elbow.