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Subspace will officially launch its parallel and real-time Internet service for games and meta-universe on November 16.

In the past few years, Subspace has built a parallel network using its own network and hardware, as well as partnerships with dark fiber or Internet suppliers of excess capacity. Now it is launching its self-service network as a service in a few weeks. The network allows developers—such as manufacturers of real-time games—to provide real-time connections to their users.

Subspace CEO Bayan Towfiq said in an interview with GamesBeat: "I see the need for us to live in a real-time world, and the current Internet will not be able to sustain in the future."

Towfiq started working on this because the public Internet cannot satisfy critical applications that require real-time communication, such as games. It was never built for real-time interaction. It was plagued by issues such as delay, jitter, and packet loss, which ultimately hurt participation.

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"In the past few years, our team at Subspace has built a network that will fundamentally change the way multiplayer games are delivered," Towfiq said. "Publishers who care about their customers must see this. It reduces latency, covers a larger audience, and improves security. Now, we are bringing this global private network to a wider audience."

Above: Subspace CEO Bayan Towfiq (right) and CTO William King.

Subspace in Los Angeles can't talk about its partners yet, but I have discussed with them in several private roundtables what needs to happen to make the metaverse a reality. (We will have these meetings every few months because things change so fast). Subspace said it has gaming company customers with hundreds of millions of players.

Towfiq said that Subspace has built the fastest, most stable, highly available and secure network for Internet applications. Its slogan is "Every millisecond is important."

Above: Subspace hopes to provide games without delay.

Some of them are intuitive. Speedtest told me that my ping time to the server in San Jose, California was 11 milliseconds, but Meter.net said that my ping time to the server in Dallas, Texas was 61 milliseconds. When I was playing "Call of Duty: Warzone", I wanted to fire at the enemy. The last thing I wanted to see was the screen freeze, and the enemy would attack me because my computer and connection speed were too slow.

Subspace has deployed global private networks in hundreds of cities, including dedicated fiber optic backbone networks, patented Internet weather maps, and customized hardware. This network pulls game traffic off the Internet close to users and ensures the fastest and most stable path.

But Towfiq said the technology goes beyond faster networks.

"For the first time, Subspace allows existing games and Internet applications to bring a private network to every device connected to the Internet without changing the code, VPN client or internal hardware," he said.

Companies like Activision Blizzard don’t want players to be angry with them because of latency issues, which are more related to the underlying structure of the Internet than any defects in the game itself.

Latency is the time it takes for a data signal to travel from one point on the Internet to another and back. This is measured in milliseconds (thousandths of a second). If the delay is poor, then the fast action game will not run well. Your frame rate may slow down to a crawl, or you can try to shoot someone and miss it because when you aim at a place, the person is no longer there. Subspace believes that it can reduce latency by 80% for players in 60 countries.

You can think of what Subspace is building as a ghost Internet, or a network of private servers that can be used by multiplayer gamers to bypass Internet bottlenecks. Subspace solves these bottlenecks, a bit like how Waze helped you—or at least once helped you—find a solution to car traffic congestion. To this end, the company raised $26 million in April 2020. It's a bit like a content delivery network (CDN) for games.

The question it deals with is why the redundant Internet, which was originally designed for use in nuclear war situations, was messed up. Internet packets must jump from one type of infrastructure owned by one company to another type of infrastructure owned by another company. These handovers take time, and routing is not as efficient as expected.

The people who need this kind of dredging traffic most are multiplayer gamers, because the coronavirus has forced us to stay at home and doomed many of us to entertain ourselves through multiplayer games, such as "Call of Duty: War Zone" ( I am particularly obsessed with), League of Legends, or FIFA. Subspace must come up with a combination of software and hardware to create a parallel Internet, or bypass problematic traffic and create a fast track for game companies that pay for Subspace speed.

Above: All the challenges that slow down the game.

Ron Williams, vice president of operations at Subspace, said: "We are building a real-time Internet, where games are the largest component, and we think it can be better." "We are still limited by the speed of light and the number of data centers. There is a lot of work to be done. But we can use the Internet as we do today to make it better and lift many restrictions on game developers. The problem is that no one thought of these things in 1969."

Subspace's network platform provides the highest performance agent service for real-time application deployment, operation, and AI optimization and expansion. It does not require end-user hardware or configuration changes, because it is achieved through simple configuration, proxying game traffic to Subspace. It provides continuous protection against hacker attacks, known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

In the short term, Subspace has increased the number of players who can play ping, thereby increasing the total addressable market and player engagement.

If Subspace can improve the satisfaction of playing online games, then it can increase the time people spend in games. A 2020 report stated that gamers around the world play an average of 6.3 hours a week, and players between the ages of 18 and 45 play an average of more than 7 hours. This does not include the extra 3.5 hours and 4.6 hours spent by women and men each week watching other people play video games, while the younger group devotes more time.

Companies such as Epic Games and Roblox are adding concerts and by adding a new form of entertainment to the game, giving people more reasons to come back and spend more time in their world. This is how the Metaverse ultimately happens, when we have enough reason to spend a whole day in it.

Hilmar Veigar Petursson, CEO of CCP Games, the maker of Eve Online, said in an email to GamesBeat that he met Subspace in the spring of 2019 when the company was facing some serious distributed denial of service attacks. Although his company ultimately did not use them, Petursson was impressed by becoming an investor in the subspace.

"The depth of their knowledge and the way they built the network left a deep impression on me. I even became an investor," he said. "The technology itself is very impressive and solves a widely applicable problem, but it is especially serious for games and gamers, and it usually affects the experience more than the company. Routing on the Internet is very bad."

Above: Subspace is expanding its reach through its network as a service.

It just so happens that making the Internet be beneficial to games and meta-universes. The universes of the virtual world are all interconnected, just like in novels such as "Avalanche" and "Player One".

"On the Internet today, metaverse is impossible," Towfiq said. "Just as multiplayer online games are limited by current network conditions, metaverse can only be achieved by delivering dedicated network functions to any destination on the Internet. With Subspace, virtual interactions can span continents with minimal delay and high availability."

Epyllion’s meta-futurist and CEO Matthew Ball invested in Subspace. Ball wrote in an article about Metaverse thinking: "In video games, humans have very low latency thresholds, especially when compared to other media. For example, consider traditional video and video games."

He said that ordinary people will not even notice if the audio is out of sync with the video unless it is advanced by more than 45 milliseconds or delayed by more than 125 milliseconds (170 milliseconds in total). The acceptability threshold is even wider, 90 milliseconds early and 185 milliseconds late (275 milliseconds). For digital buttons, such as the YouTube pause button, if we don’t see a response after 200-250 milliseconds, we will only consider our click to fail.

"In 3A games, avid gamers will feel frustrated at 50 milliseconds, and even non-game players will feel blocked at 110 milliseconds," Bauer wrote. "The game cannot be played within 150 milliseconds. Subspace found that, on average, an increase or decrease in latency by 10 milliseconds will reduce or increase the weekly game time by 6%. This is an extraordinary exposure-something other companies do not have. of."

Above: Subspace is building a parallel Internet.

Subspace found that about three-quarters of Internet connections in the Middle East exceed the playable latency of dynamic multiplayer games, while in the United States and Europe, one-quarter is bad. Ball writes that this mainly reflects the limitations of broadband infrastructure, not server placement.

For example, Subspace deploys hardware in hundreds of cities to develop a "weather map" for low-latency network pathfinding, runs a network stack, and then coordinates the needs of low-latency applications with the many third parties that make up the path, Ball wrote , And even established a fiber optic network, which can connect various fiber optic networks to further shorten the distance between servers and minimize the use of non-fiber cabling.

"Our mission is to provide a real-time connection from anywhere to any place so that metaverse can happen," Towfiq said. "One of the requirements of Metaverse is that it is created and operated by a series of contributors, accessible to everyone."

The functions of the private network used by corporate companies can now be accessed through self-service through any Internet application. Although gaming companies have created large-scale multiplayer online experiences-such as Amazon's New World-they have not considered the interconnection services normally provided by other companies running Internet backbones. This is why game companies have to switch to Subspace.

"You don't have to build a lot of specialized technology for your game," Williams said. "In Metaverse, we know that interoperability issues are really starting to multiply."

Brendan Greene, creator of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), proposed the creation of a planet-sized world called Artemis that requires real-time access to extremely detailed worlds. He realized that he needed the latest multiplayer technology to realize this huge world in the next five years or so. Towfiq said that it is the ambition of the game company that will lead to the creation of the metaverse.

Subspace said that in the long run, as the end user experience improves, more consumers will experience the durable, synchronized quality of Metaverse, and it can be accessed by an unlimited number of concurrent users. But today's Internet hinders the vision of metaverse because it requires 100% uptime and ultra-low latency, as we saw in Steven Spielberg's movie Ready Player One.

However, we often see the impact of network latency on real-time interactions, and this impact is exacerbated by the pandemic and the increasing demand for the Internet (remote work). If your Zoom call drops during an important meeting, you don't care who is at fault. You want to fix it. Towfiq said, this is where Subspace comes in. When the application is no longer constrained by the network, the metaverse becomes possible.

Subspace's plan is to reduce game delays and delays on a large scale. It will use its infrastructure to help the massively multiplayer online gaming experience flourish, and it will build more infrastructure to handle more real-time applications to provide real-time connections from anywhere to any place. In the long term, Towfiq's goal is to make the world online.

Towfiq, a veteran in the telecommunications industry and the founder of Flowroute (sold to West/Intrado), founded the company in 2018. Part of his goal is to allow the global population to have access to the Internet, not just developed countries, because there are no people in the world, and it is not a true metaverse.

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