Will AR and VR Finally Make the Net Neutrality Debate Superfluous?

“Network neutrality” rules never have been designed to prevent business services from providing different levels of service; prioritized delivery or quality of service. That is precisely why content delivery networks add value.

The issue is whether rules mandating that nothing other than “best effort” internet access for consumers actually is good policy, going forward, if one assumes that any number of new apps and services, based on augmented reality or virtual reality, are going to be important some day, for consumers.

With the caveat that there is much nonsense in the arguments made in favor of network neutrality rules--“save the internet” being among the most obvious examples of that--it seems obvious that if VR and AR require stringent control of latency, that is an obvious example of why forbidding anything other than best-effort internet access is going to be an obstacle to AR and VR apps and services.

For gaming apps, a human requires 13 milliseconds or more to detect an event. A motor response by a gamer might add 100 ms of latency, just to react. But then consider artificial reality or augmented reality use cases.

To be nearly indistinguishable from reality, one expert says a VR system should ideally have a delay of seven milliseconds to 15 ms ms between the time a player moves their head and the time the player sees a new, corrected view of the scene.

The Oculus Rift can achieve latency of about 30 ms or 40 ms under perfectly optimized conditions, according to Palmer Luckey.

There also are other latency issues, such as display latency. A mobile phone, for example, might add 40 ms to 50 ms to render content on the screen. Any display device is going to add about that much latency, in all likelihood.

The point is that end-to-end latency is an issue for VR apps, and edge computing helps address a potentially-important part of that latency.  

To have any hope of reducing latency to tolerances imposed by the displays themselves, VR and AR content will have to have extensive forms of quality of service guarantees, almost certainly by caching content at the very edges of the network, and using networks such as 5G with very low latency.

To be sure, it is not clear that something other than 5G best effort latency is a problem if the edge data centers are close enough to the radio sites. On the other hand, neither is it obvious that an edge services provider can be legally barred from charging for the use of what is a next-generation content delivery network.

And that might ultimately be the practical resolution of the “best effort only” conundrum. Perhaps standard best-effort delivery on a 5G network is good enough to support VR and AR, so long as content is edge cached. So there are no fast lanes or slow lanes: all lanes are fast.

On the other hand, edge computing services can charge a market rate for use of their edge computing networks.