It's confession time

Does the term 'LPB' mean anything to people out there?

No? Well that probably means you have more of a social life than I thought you did...

LPB stands for "Low-Pinging Bastard"...in layman's terms someone who has an uber-level amount of bandwidth and a lower 'ping' to a gaming server than their competitors.

an old favourite

This means they can have a few more milliseconds to react to their moves and can generally wipe the floor with anyone else on the same server -- regardless of skill level. Hence the term "bastard".

It's confession time: I was a LPB.

Back when I was in my undergraduate days, one of the only ways to get this sort of connection was to live on campus and plug your PC into AARNet's powerful academic network.

Which I did. Frequently. Nightly.

Yes, I confess. I used this high-end network built for academics for hours and hours for years on end to kill people in Quake.

People all over the globe. But particularly people in Canberra because there was a guy at one of the universities there who was hosting a Quake server from his dorm room.

Probably also using AARNet.

Now I see that they're upgrading AARNet to provide researchers with speeds up to 10 Gigabits per second.

Although this is a laudable initiative that will, in the end, allow researchers to do cool stuff involving physics and astronomy....when it comes right down to it, the reality is that this bandwidth will still carry millions and millions of packets of data relating solely to games like Quake.

And all the expensive new Cisco and Juniper kit will mean to college students in dimly lit rooms all over the nation is that their pings will drop just that little bit more.

Thankfully I'm now sitting here in ZDNet HQ where we have a corporate-level connection which is probably almost as good...so bring it on.