Hi,
We added signatures for both the Xbox One and Playstation 4 to our traffic management database yesterday ahead of the console releases. Our suppliers have been working with Microsoft to ensure the Xbox is properly detected as they've made big changes to ensure the Xbox One is IPv6 ready. The Playstation traffic isn't as different to the PS3 but again it should be detected correctly.
There are different types of traffic detected, depending on what you are doing. The actual gaming traffic on most products will go into our titanium (highest priority) queue. Game downloads like the day one patches and digital downloads will go in either gold or silver depending on product. We don't think these types of download, especially given how the new consoles are going to work, should go in titanium. For example, some games will be playable before you download the whole game, if that's an online game if you're downloading the rest of the game while you try and play then the download could increase the latency on the game if they were the same priority and mean you run in to problems with the game.
Our network is designed and scaled so that if you are on Unlimited or Unlimited Fibre you should see the same speed on a download regardless of whether it's in the highest priority (titanium queue) or lowest priority (bronze queue). The idea behind the priorities is to firstly give the customer the best experience, imagine in your household you're downloading the NBA game on the Xbox One which is 40GB, you decide to play Call of Duty on the Xbox 360 while you wait and someone else is watching Doctor Who on iPlayer. The way we've set this up as that iPlayer would play without buffering, the gaming wouldn't have any lag but the NBA game would be a bit slower at downloading than were you not doing anything else. The second idea behind the priorities is for us in outage or extreme demand situations so that we can protect the high priority applications (gaming, VoIP, business VPN, streaming etc.).
While we expect a fair bit of traffic tomorrow and over the weekend (and next week for the PS4) from people downloading the day 1 patch (ourselves included) and some of the games we don't think the levels of demand will be as high as the day iOS7 was released for example. Coming out on a Friday will help as well as that's the quietest day of the week. I don't see any reason why you shouldn't see decent speeds downloading from our point of view.
Dave Tomlinson
Enterprise Architect - Network & OSS
Plusnet Technology
