Unless you work in networking or you're a serious gamer, you've probably never heard of the term bufferbloat. But it could be the hidden cause of your lag, high ping, and frustrating connection issues in online games.
In this blog, we'll break down everything you need to know about bufferbloat without going into too much technical detail. We'll be covering what bufferbloat is, how it disrupts gaming performance, and most importantly, how to fix it.
What is Bufferbloat?
When it comes to your internet service package, you will have an allocated maximum speed for your network. When the devices or applications on your network try to use more than your maximum speed, problems start to occur.
As the traffic builds up on your network and your speed is maxed out, everything starts to slow down. Similar to rush hour traffic on a highway, when too many cars pile up, everything slows to a crawl. The same thing happens to your network traffic, leading to delays (increased latency).
For latency-sensitive activities like online gaming and video calls, which require real-time data transmission, this delay is a major issue. These applications depend on a steady, low-latency connection to function properly.
When gaming data packets specifically get stuck in a congested queue, it caused multiple problems that will ruin your gaming experience. These problems can include input delay, ping spikes and packet loss.
Increased latency will negatively affect the whole network, so all applications will suffer when bufferbloat occurs.
Here’s an example of a speed test on a network suffering from bufferbloat. Notice the 191 ms ping under load (blue arrow). This means when the network is busy, latency skyrockets, making games unplayable and video calls low quality and choppy.
What Causes Bufferbloat?
Now that we know what bufferbloat is, why does it happen?
The root cause is network congestion—specifically, when more data is being sent than your network can handle. This is especially common when running high-bandwidth activities like: streaming 4K video and file downloads on the network.
Without proper traffic management, these applications consume all available bandwidth and saturated the network, leaving gaming packets stuck in a queue behind larger traffic.
While bufferbloat affects all types of network traffic, gaming traffic will be affected the most because it disrupts the required real time data flow needed for smooth gameplay.
Current Solutions to Bufferbloat
Most modern routers attempt to reduce bufferbloat using QoS (Quality of Service) and SQM (Smart Queue Management). These methods help manage congestion by prioritizing certain types of traffic, but they have limitations:
- Manual setup required: Users often need to tweak settings for the best performance.
- Reduced speeds: Traditional solutions limit bandwidth to reduce latency, meaning users may not get the full speeds they pay for.
At Netduma, we've developed a smarter way to eliminate bufferbloat once and for all.
Our Netduma routers, powered by DumaOS, introduces advanced features like SmartBOOST and Ping Optimiser, designed to combat congestion and improve your bufferbloat score. However, we knew we could go even further.
After years of development, we’ve created the ultimate solution: Netduma Optima's Adaptive Congestion Control (ACC).
How ACC Solves Bufferbloat
So what does Adaptive Congestion Control do differently? To put it simply, it fixes the internet, and that's not an exaggeration. ACC eliminates queuing on your network in both directions, with no reduced speeds and zero packet loss.
It achieves this by working with proprietary technologies we have made that identify specific network traffic and allocates them to optimal amount of bandwidth. This means no matter how busy your network becomes, latency sensitive traffic like gaming stay fast and smooth.
You can see the results for yourself below. With ACC enabled, the ping under load stays incredibly low at 12 ms compared to the previous 191 ms.
Speedtest.net have also added quality of experience ratings for certain types of activities (web browsing, gaming, streaming and work calls) on your network.
With ACC there's no impact to gaming, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable gaming experience, even on a busy network.
It's been our aim to get this technology to users for years now, and its almost there. We'll be initially rolling ACC and the other Netduma Optima features to our flagship Netduma R3 router in the near future. It will also be available for our partner internet service providers.
ACC is one of the most important features we have ever made, and we can't wait to share more information over the next few months as we progress through beta testing.
If you want to learn more about ACC, and the other ground-breaking technologies in Netduma Optima, check out the rest of our website here.