It is interesting to compare this to congested public wifi (congested internet connection behind the wifi). Or Comcast in some (many?) cases for that matter... Congestion is worse these days but when things go well bandwidth and latency are much better. UDP is also a "if there is any congestion drop this first" flag (first attempt retry via a tcp connection that is kept open but normally not used might be an interesting tactic to try these days).
With bittorent and browsers opening a zillion connections at once, a single connection can be easily swamped. For those of us using a VPN past the ISP, that means everything, but a game with a single connection is likely just as vulnerable. These days (if not using a server) having clients each send their data and what they received from everyone else to all other clients might be more likely to work.
Damn right. I remember playing the original Unreal Tournament and if you had a ping time under 350ms you were doing incredibly well. It was about the slowest you could have whilst still having any chance in the game.
And that was of course fine until these people with cable or DSL broadband started getting in on the act with their 70-80ms ping times, and wiped the floor with all us saddos still on dial-up connections. (Or equally, you'd get some cocky sod jump on from their university network and, equally, annihilate everybody else.)
