Upstream Girl

Plenty has been said, and plenty continues to be said, about the upcoming voice feature to Second Life. Now that the beta has gone live, there's a lot of comments about it on the blog, but I shall not be using it for a wholly different reason than any of the ones given there.

When I was with Telewest in the UK I got a speed of 3Mb/512k and the latter is the important number - it's the upstream value, the amount of data per second that your computer can send back to your ISP.

When I first came to Canada, that changed to 5Mb/384k which was faster at receiving but slower at sending. This was still okay for what I wanted; SL worked fine, and so did WoW.

Now I've moved ISPs again to Sympatico, and quite frankly they're not very good, but at the present time they're all I can get onto. Their speed is 3Mb/256k which again is fine for receiving, but now on the threshold for transmitting. World of Warcraft now has severe latency problems, and Second Life - without voice - is also somewhat laggy. Add the strain of having to deal with voice streams coming in and going out, and the whole thing will collapse into lag hell. I already can't use Skype or Ventrillo with either Second Life or World of Warcraft without getting such severe breaking that people can't understand what I'm saying.

I reserve judgement on whether it's a good or a bad idea to add voice to Second Life. I do agree that many "girls" out there will end up being proved to be men, and I do think a lot of escorts may lose their jobs when the clientèle discover they've actually been engaging in gay cybersex. But all this doesn't matter to me... Second Life is, after all, a game, and if guys want to play girls, or girls want to play guys, that's fine with me. But those who are on slow upstreams like I currently am won't have a choice about voice, because they simply won't have the bandwidth for the extra functions. Perhaps Linden Labs' time would be better spent fixing bugs and improving compression (and particularly trying to do something about packet loss, which is one of Second Life's particular bugbears) than introducing new slowdowns to the grid.