The internet can kill you, in a manner of speaking, not because it is dangerous but because it is too slow.
A Carlow Institute of Technology researcher is trying to solve this problem by trading more internet speed for less information.
"How the Internet Might Kill You (virtually)" was the intriguing title of a talk yesterday in Carlow by Brian Carrig.
A PhD candidate in IT Carlow's department of computers and networks, he spoke of problems faced by computer game players who use the internet to play games over distances.
"Multiplayer games have very specific requirements for them to run correctly. When you are running a game over the internet the traffic mixes with other traffic and causes delays in the game."
He said gamers do not like pauses in play, so the games manufacturers came up with a quick-fix solution; getting the games console to guess the distant player's next move.
This is fine as long as the guess is correct, but if not the game suddenly jumps when the distant player's actual move arrives.
"Anyone who plays games regularly is familiar with this; when a game jumps back. You might have killed a player but they then suddenly come back to life."
He received a research grant to find a solution to this problem from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology's Embark Initiative. It forms the subject of his PhD research.
He said it was possible to prioritise games traffic "but if you do that somebody will have to pay for it". He is now looking at allowing the internet to "lose" some of the game data being sent back and forth in exchange for faster transmission. In this way if a player is killed off they are more likely to stay that way.