Hi, I'm Anthony and I'm 36 years old, and I've been playing video games for about 30 years now. I've spent the last few years offline in an increasingly online world. Let me show you around.

Three years ago I was living in a leafy suburb of Melbourne called Surrey Hills. I had a few house mates a great Internet connection and all the games we could play; life was great. When one of my house mates moved interstate to work in the mining industry I decided that I should consider buying a house before I got too old. The repayment schedule was probably going to be set at 30 years given my age and income and if I waited too much longer I might not have a chance.

So I looked around at houses in developing areas but they quickly moved out of my price range as Melbourne was undergoing a real-estate boom at the time. After sitting down with my parents we decided to investigate building a house. This ended up being the only way I could get a house, as the price for land was set and I wasn't competing against investors or couples with a larger borrowing capacity than me. The deal was signed and I moved back in with my parents for twelve months whilst the house was built. This is not a good feeling for a 33 year old, but I was happy for the opportunity.

When my house was finally complete I was one of only three people living in the estate as most of the houses weren't complete yet. There were a couple of tense evenings where my street was used for burnout practice and half-completed houses were broken into to steal fittings, but it wasn't too bad. I was in my own home, and there would be no more rental inspections; something that I hated whilst renting.

As the estate become more populated I noticed my Internet starting to get slower and slower. I'm a network engineer in my day job, so I put my skills to work and found large amounts of latency present almost as soon as the packets left my ADSL modem. As the months rolled on this turned into large amounts of packet loss. It finally settled down into a regular speed of 1.2kb - 5kb/sec and about 10% packet loss — slower than an analogue modem. Calls to my ISP confirmed my worst fears; the telephone exchange I was on was congested.

Laying copper pairs in the ground is expensive. So the national carrier here in Australia relies on a much cheaper method of getting phone lines to new houses called a Customer Multiplexer (CMUX). Rather than having copper run back to the telephone exchange, a CMUX provides a short run of copper to the house and then a fibre or Ethernet link back to the telephone exchange. If you load a CMUX up with more people than that link to the telephone exchange can carry then you’re going to get congestion.

People in this situation find themselves stuck in Limbo as their ISP can’t do anything about this. They can complain to the carrier, but the carrier’s only contractual agreement is to provide a working telephone line. 3G/4G services in this environment also suffer as they have their own issues with congestion, people on congested ADSL flock to them as an alternative. 3G in my area was often worse, and on school holidays it was unusable.

So here’s a list of things you can’t do on a congested telephone exchange:

• Watch Youtube
• Log on to Steam
• Sign in to XBox Live/PSN
• Use Ventrilo/Mumble/Teamspeak
• Download music from iTunes

So why have it at all, right? In most cases your ISP will offer to release you from your contract when you suffer exchange congestion. But this means you'll lose your spot in an already congested environment and may be completely without Internet even after the problem is resolved. The most common advice given to those on a congested exchanges is to switch your Internet plan to the cheapest one you can find to hang onto your phone line, and wait.

How long did I wait exactly?

Three years. It took three years for the national carrier to upgrade my exchange to support the number people they’d sold telephone lines to. How did I survive? Well Steam offline mode works well, and I’d download newer games from friends houses or take my PC into work to activate or download software. There were sacrifices though, I was a big MMO player at the time and I had to cancel the few I was subscribed to, quit guilds and cancel the Ventrilo server I was renting.

I skipped Diablo 3, and skipped SimCity. Most people would say I was lucky, but I would have at least liked to have had the choice.

I've bought both the original XBox and Xbox 360 but I won’t be getting an XBox One. Why? Because there’s too many people who are in the same situation I was. Microsoft is turning it’s back on people who play games, just like you and me. This isn't about us and our games any more, it’s about them and what they can get away with.

I won’t be a part of it.