Killer NIC to accelerate VOIP

[W1nTry]

This is quite interesting

Killer NIC to accelerate VoIP

Bigfoot, big shoe

By Theo Valich: Thursday, 22 November 2007, 11:01 AM

BIGFOOT NETWORKS teamed up with an outfit called Diamondware, with the aim of bringing VoIP acceleration onto the Killer NIC card.

The idea that all of the client-side processing for the VoIP function in MMORPG and FPS games end up on a network card is very interesting, mostly due to the fact that latency would not increase, unlike regular spikes that follow every VoIP conversation while you're shooting it away in your favourite game.

While in general MMORPGs have shown to be a bit more resilient to problems with lag than FPSes, the popularity of World of Warcraft and having 20 or even 40 people in a same team proved that latency has entered the world of MMOs as well. You can grind with 1sec lag, but when it comes to playing in a team, and either DPSing or healing or simply playing, network problems count.

Besides the fact that this concept of utilizing VoIP technology should eliminate the lag, 3D spatial part also brings the positioning of the people in the room, which could prove rather interesting. Imagine sitting in a room with your 20 or 40 mates, sorting out a strategy and voice from every player comes like he's in that part of the room.

This expansion into VoIP world with DiamondWare technology brings the number of available clients to six, following hardware Firewall, Game patcher, Bit-Torrent client, FTP client and Telnet.

This technology should be available for download before year's end.