The first (probably) Lebanese gaming network

teodorgeorgiev

Sorry, if it sounds like an advertise. But I think it was about time:

http://games.visp.net.lb

We just feel that we need it. Net&sysadmins are human beings too. We like gaming as well :)
Damn too much :)

P.S. The forum shall be ready in a few hours

rolf

It's official: V.I.S.P. rules

rolf

Unfortunately the game servers seem to have private IP's so they're only for V.I.S.P. users.

teodorgeorgiev

Not only.
GlobalProof & TerraNet users shall be also able to play.

http://games.visp.net.lb/rules.php <-- read here.

The issue is -> in order for the other ISP users to be able to play in the VISP gaming network, the ISPs have to interconnect with us. Otherwise, the latency would be way to high. Like from IDM, the connection would go to USA and then back to VISP. Unacceptable. The latency will jump to more than 400ms for sure. With such a latency the lebanese gamers will keep playing on the international game servers.

With Terra, we made a direct connection between our networks. The latency (ping RTT delay) is less than 40ms.

Other ISPs do not even want to hear about interconnecting. I have never seen such a rude, arrogant and selfish attitude (well, I have seen it, but I won't mention the countries). It was also a hard task to convince Terra (thanks to our CTO). Looks like others do not even give a *** about their users. The only thing they care is to fill their pockets. I do not know how do you expect from the same ISPs to drop their prices or increase the capacity... ... ...

patrick

so basically only terranet and bullet proof users are able to play?

teodorgeorgiev

Patrick :)

GP customers are not bulletproof by default. Pls, do not test it, you will end up with a murder :)

Unfortunately - that is the true. We can't put a gun against the heads of other ISPs and force them: "Interconnect!!!".

When we offered this, what we'v got is completely ignorance. At the very best case, the question was: "OK, where is our profit from this action, we can't see it anywhere?". Guess what was the result after our reply "No profit, its for the sake of customers. It's just a cool idea"... ... ...

I am sorry, that is what we were able to do.
I am not sure even how TerraNet will react when customers will start using the link playing games in the VISP gaming network. Pray God, they won't change their mind to bad... ...

Somehow, Rolf was pretty right - a retarded country :(

rolf

Sadus

Heya,
I think the games.visp.net.lb is an excellent idea. I was going to implement this in KSA's biggest ISP, what's cool there is that all ISPs are interconnected with fiber optics, latency between ISPs' routers are less than 10 ms.

It's not surprising that Ogero doesn't oblige ISPs to be interconected (thru Ogero of course), the only way to implement interconnection is if Lebanese users browse most of the time websites hosted in Lebanon, which obviously is not the case. Another issue is that local traffic in Lebanon doesn't exist, IP delegation and .lb TLD are not well organized, most of us connect to the net with USA/UK/Russian IPs (Emiraty IP for my case). This should change very soon when Ogero expands their international traffic bandwidth and takeover AUB's domain name system authority.
What justifies KSA's ISPs interconnection is that 80% of the websites and hosts browsed in KSA are arabic websites. Those websites are currently moving their websites from USA/UK hosting companies to local ones, which of course improves performance and speed dramaticaly and generate much much less international traffic.
KSA ISPs are also hosting many mirrors such as http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com, http://www.kernel.org, http://www.cpan.org etc...

teodorgeorgiev

Sadus,

that is the way it should be !!!
If organised properly, interconnection between the ISP will help to have 25-30% of the traffic not leaving Lebanon at all.
Not only it will drop the latency dramatically, but will make the Internet cheaper, because it will be LOCAL CONNECTIVITY, not Internet to outside.
Local game servers, local IRC servers, local huge databases with movies, programs, games, mp3... ...

The usage of satellite internet providers from Russia, Kuwait and God knows where else, makes the task harder, as you have said.

Damn it, Saudi are in a much better position, despite the 'religion' restrictions there.

OK, VISP is trying to do that... but khalas, we are not Gods... we are not almighty. We try to do something good and all other jump on us to "eat us with the clothes". Looks like some companies and individuals really want to keep the Lebanese IT comunnity in the stone-era.

Jordan is also moving faster than Lebanon in the Internet situation. The government put in the newspapers --> the intenational Internet "pipe" is almost full. Khalas guys, in which dimension have you been all the time to not mention this fact. Once the capacity has reached 75%, they should IMMEDIATELLY request an upgrade. But no way... "sweet job, state job..."

The issue is, a clever will try to improve himself, should a notice be given on some his personal disadvantage. The fool will become angry and will attack asking for revenge and excuse. But this will not make him better.

Sadus

teodorgeorgiev,
Saying that open source communities such as Linux, FreeBSD, PHP, MySQL are non-profit directed companies is very wrong. Open source never meant for free. If you were smarter you should do some researches on the real companies behind those examples you mentioned.

and btw, VISP is doing it's game network for a 100% profitable reason. Its pure advertizing/public relation/marketing and i don't blame them, i still think its a great idea.

teodorgeorgiev

Sadus, I have not said that open-source is free. Indeed, usually open-source is free, but it is not a must. In example, Radiator is a product that is an open-source, but a commercial one.

GPL is free though :)

You can not know the idea besides the VISP gaming network. As the author if this idea, I can say that the idea is to be something non-profit. You can go and check on google for my name. I have taken part in some projects without any profit.

Marketing? Yes, why not. This will make VISP popular among the young Internet population of Lebanon, but you know that the most desired customers by the ISPs are corporate ones (companies like banks, government organisatons and similar), not the young individuals. Come on, you know it.

Anyway, lets call the profit --> marketing. Even with this, the idea is pretty ok for me. Instead of wasting money for stupid paper flyers/pamfletes or poster/radio/TV advertising with nice looking girls top-models, to make a gaming network. Damn better it is...

Sadus

GPL is NOT for free, the GNU public license's moto is: Free as in freedom, not as in beer

samer

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