Massively multiplayer online games are a rapidly growing industry increasingly involving both professional players and serious amateurs wanting premium performance from their gaming rigs.

And Vodafone Group Head of Network Strategy and Architecture Santiago Tenorio knows well, that the biggest bugbear is the amount of latency that gamers experience.

"The more time they spend playing the more often they need to communicate in real time with other players, over the internet.

"Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay between my home and the server and has a direct impact on the time it takes from other players taking an action and that action appearing on my screen," Santiago said.

The main contributor of latency is the distance that the command needs to travel from the home network to the gaming company’s servers, which can be in another country.

"To evolve our networks to enable gamers to get lower levels of latency, we are planning to use Multi-access Edge Computing to host applications virtually and therefore closer to customers.

"We are currently exploring pilots to host servers for gaming companies on our networks. This could provide a premium gaming experience for Vodafone customers," Santiago added.

These planned trials will help Vodafone be ready for a future where customers are expected to play far more virtual reality and augmented reality games over fixed and mobile networks.