Let's get one thing out of the way: computer or video games, whatever you want to call them, are not the sole domain of young males and haven't been for a while now.
Nowadays, gamers span all ages, genders and walks of life: "I game frequently but was recently blown away when I discovered there are people aged 65-plus in our gaming squad," says Yaseen Abbas, product owner for broadband in Vodafone New Zealand's digital division.
Vodafone has a close relationship with the gaming industry, Yaseen says, including strong partnerships with esports provider LetsPlay.Live and now PlayStation in New Zealand. It is a growing sector with huge potential – and is predicted to be a billion-dollar export industry for New Zealand by 2024.
So what can gamers look forward to with the 5G wireless technology that Vodafone New Zealand is rolling out in the fifth generation mobile network?
First, the perhaps not-so-obvious advantage is that 5G provides better access to gaming. To understand why, some technical background is necessary: a good gaming experience requires a snappy network connection.
That means low latency and jitter (the former is the delay between sending and receiving data packets, the latter is the timing variation in that delay, which can be difficult to compensate for). The lower the latency and jitter, the more responsive the connection and the better your survival rates in a game. High throughput to quickly load games and updates is important too.
"Sometimes I've only got an hour set aside for gaming; if I have to wait for updates to download on a slow connection before I can start, well, that can be the difference in playing or not which kind of sucks the joy out of gaming," Yaseen says.
That's why fibre-optic connections are popular with gamers – they tick all the boxes. However not everyone has fibre or can get it, which is where 5G mobile comes in.
"Approximately 60 per cent of broadband customers in New Zealand are using fibre,"
Yaseen says. "A portion of the remainder have not yet taken fibre for different reasons, like their landlords not giving permission to dig up the driveway for the cabling or they live in multi-dwelling units."
In that scenario, 5G, which can offer throughput in the hundreds of megabits per second range and latency that's typically 30-40 ms; even as low as 20 ms, still gives gamers that "fibre-like" connection. That level of performance makes 5G gamers competitive with their fibre-connected peers, Yaseen says.
With 5G, multi-access edge computing (MEC) the latency could drop to less than 10 milliseconds – which is what fibre subscribers get when connecting to local content delivery network nodes.
MEC is where the processing is done close to users, at cellphone towers or exchanges, where a cached copy of a game sits.
5G will make gaming even better when using the even faster, high frequency millimetre wavelength radio frequencies which supports multi-gigabit speeds, enabling highly detailed and responsive virtual and augmented reality apps.
Mobile gaming is increasing in popularity, Yaseen says. Apple recently unveiled its 5G capable iPhone 12 range; one of the demos featured Rift Games, developers of wildly popular game, League of Legends.
That game demands powerful computing resources and has so far only been available for PCs. That's about to change with an iPhone 12 including the powerful A14 Bionic chip and a fast, responsive 5G connection – perhaps providing an even better experience than on some PCs.
Cloud gaming is another area to watch out for. Tech companies have long sought to put the heavy lifting for games onto servers in data centres so players don't have to buy expensive PCs with powerful graphics cards and processors.
As cloud gaming needs fast and responsive network connections (lag is bad), it hasn't really taken off yet. 5G has all the right ingredients here to make it happen – and that includes mobility. You can play whenever it suits you, thanks to 5G.
For more, visit www.vodafone.co.nz/5G