Traffic management needs updating

[#1]

Traffic from some new PS4 games, fifa and driveclub showing up as Other & Browsing.  Any chance Plusnet could update systems to recognise these games?
Noticed these games traffic stats not showing in the Gaming stats so I guess they aren't being given priority?
Do new games get checked eventually anyway?

[#2]

Hi Justin7,
Thanks for flagging this to us, I believe you're referring to the usage generated by the games showing up in the 'View My Broadband Usage' section of the portal?
If so, there can be some different protocols used by various games which would fall into different categories. One to note would be some games using Peer2Peer traffic, ideally we would want this to show up as gaming in the usage graphs however having this segmented from regular Peer2Peer can be difficult so not all traffic can be categorised correctly.
As technology changes and traffic identification progresses, there may well be scope for this to be better implemented in the future but for the meantime, there will be discrepancies when categorisation is concerned.

[#3]

most games use the standard ports,how can your system not tell the difference? i dont think your traffic management for games work.if it did fifa.cod.gears of war 2 and 3 would be smooth.

[#4]

Hi Adam
Thanks for taking time out to reply.
You are right in thinking that I raised this issue because I saw the traffic stats in the usage graphs. It was clear that data from those ps4 games were not appearing in the Gaming category.  A while back I noticed similar was happening with destiny and the data showed up as p2p. Some changes were made to Plusnet systems and then the data was going into gaming correctly.  This seemed to correlate to problems with issues with the game people reporting on here , soon after the change problems with the game seemed fix for people.
So I had assumed that if data shows up as something other than gaming in the usage stats then it is being handled by traffic management in that way too.  I think some of the recent multi player games on ps4 are using a variety of different ports than some of the standard ones used by games in the past and maybe some people's experience could be improved if the traffic is identified and handled with greater accuracy?

[#5]

Hi Justin7,
Thanks for getting back to us. There is a chance that the traffic management could be handling this incorrectly however this isn't link so if the usage shows up in VMBU as Peer2Peer, it doesn't mean that the traffic management is handling it as Peer2Peer. The only true measure we can see is if you're able to run some Wireshark captures while you're playing the game(s) in question and we can see how the traffic is being managed.
Given that you're playing on a PS4 it can be a bit tricky to do as we can't run Wireshark on the PS4 which means that some internetz wizardry would be required to clone the port being used by the PS4, this will allow the same traffic to be duplicated on another port where we can run a PC with Wireshark and check the traffic to ensure it is being managed correctly.
We do test a lot of games in house to make sure that the management is correct however in this day and age, it isn't outside the realms of reality for the traffic types to switch as a game is updates or DLC is introduced so something could be running fine and it's then updated and we can see issues. If you're happy to go ahead with running some Wireshark captures then just let me know and I can provide a rough guide on doing this along with some details on running Wireshark itself.

[#6]

Hopefully Justin has more luck with Wireshark than I did back on the PS3. If I remember correctly I couldn't get it working at all. Something I have noticed with Destiny is the effect it has on my TBB graph, huge latency spikes compared with something like BF4 which hardly made a noticeable difference to my graphs. Destiny being 6 vs 6 compared to BF4's 32 vs 32, I can only assume there's a lot more going on in the background than just updating player locations.

[#7]

Thanks for the updates both of you.
Learning that the usage statistics are not necessarily an indication of the traffic management I'm more hopeful that maybe the ps4 traffic could actually be handled correctly. I get the point about games can get regularly patched so port and data types can change regularly. 
Reading up about wireshark captures of console games is a time consuming task I was wandering if there is a list of console games that have already been checked or captured by Plusnet or the  community?  I know for instance that someone said recently destiny on ps4 was done and the data signature added to traffic management and not long after the usage stats for that game changed too.

[#8]

Hi Justin7,
Thanks for getting back to us and apologies for the delay in this response.
I'm glad we managed to explain the traffic prioritisation over the traffic categorisation for usage statistics. This can be a complex one to explain at times so I'm happy that we managed to do the job!
I'm afraid that we don't have any publicly published list of applications or games which have been added to the traffic management platform however we can always check specific item for you if you would like to know if it's signatures have been added.
I completely understand that running Wireshark for console traffic capture can be a nightmare of a task, personally I ended up having one of the products team here pre-configure a router along with a switch for me when I ran some Destiny captures on Xbox One and it still ended up being a little technical with the amount of software that still needed to be set up and run on a PC before play.

@Wo0x - I think the latency you're seeing with destiny is going to be down to the way in which it handles match making. From what I understand, they've employed a new way of matchmaking which constantly runs in the background and will drop players in and out of instances within the game in order to give it a slight MMO feel without being based around a singe/multiple high population server. Quite a clever feature really however it does seem to increase the traffic somewhat with the constant dropping in out of you and/or other users.

[#9]

Hi Adam,
Thanks for all the info and offer to check if signatures have been added to the system. Capturing the data from console games sounds a bit of a nightmare so think I'll try to avoid that for now!  If I want to find out if a particular games traffic type is recognised am I best to post on here?

[#10]

Hi again Justin7,
Just drop a post here or ping me a DM and we check check this for you.

[#11]

Quote from: Adam

From what I understand, they've employed a new way of matchmaking which constantly runs in the background and will drop players in and out of instances within the game in order to give it a slight MMO feel without being based around a singe/multiple high population server. Quite a clever feature really however it does seem to increase the traffic somewhat with the constant dropping in out of you and/or other users.

I would agree that it's a clever feature, if we lived in a world where everyone had decent bandwidth. Unfortunately this constant traffic isn't helpful for those without fiber, particularly those of us with upload speeds <1Mbps.
Not an issue today on PS4, though, as the network is down yet again. I wonder if the messaging system will ever be ''instant,'' the way things are going I'll end up buying an Xbox. Had the PS4 for a year, and the only time the network works as intended is for a few hours after a firmware update. The Playstation support channels are laughable, they just tell people to reboot their routers, when the end user's home network isn't the issue.
Sorry, just having a rant, lol. It's frustrating as technology is moving on, both in gaming, and in our broadband connections, but the experience is worse. I remember playing MW2, I had no issues at all when things were simpler.

[#12]

Hey Wo0x,
I completely agree, I can't imagine the connection saturation it creates is beneficial in any way for people who're stuck with lower speed connections. I suppose this is just a case of new technology out pacing the advancement of internet connectivity in the UK 

[#13]

Thanks Adam.
Would appreciate someone checking out a few new ps4 games fifa15, driveclub, last of us and the just released call of duty aw.  I think that fifa and driveclub traffic stats were counted as other last time I checked my usage.

[#14]

Hi Justin7,
drop an email over to our traffic sorcerer and see what we get back on these titles however from memory I know that Fifa 15 was added so should be handled correctly and with The Last of Us should be fine with it being an older game.
Driveclub and COD:AW are possibly in there already too but I'll see what info I can get back on them for you, we haven't heard too much fuss over them so far so would expect them to be functioning fine.

[#15]

Thanks for checking into it for us.