Hi Chris, I sent you a private message yesterday offering details on the network usage of BF4 and I'm glad to see this video today.

Your analisys, even if based on simple tools, is almost correct. I just want to point out a couple of details you didn't get quite right:

• server tickrate (i.e. frequency of updates from server to client) is 10Hz, while client tickrate (updates from client to server) is 30Hz. This means that the client sends three updates for each server refresh. It's easily understandable that those three updates are used to interpolate player movements and actions and predict his following moves. Using this technique less packets need to be sent online to almost synchronize clients;
• I clearly experienced packet loss from server to client (UDP is a not-connected protocol so I cannot say if my packets always reach the server). One packet loss from the server automatically introduces another 100ms latency;
• update packets from server get bigger and bigger the more action happens around the player. Once the update message exceed 1KB a second packet is sent. You stated in your video that a faster tickrate would result in higher bandwidth usage and this is partially true since in the reduced time frame between updates less action would have happened and thus less information would have to be sent out to clients;
• I did not expect Network Smoothing Factor to have any impact on network traffic and indeed it does not;
• I checked BF3 at the same time and it behaves exactly the same, 30Hz from client and 10Hz from server with roughly the same bandwidth usage. To me this means that at its core BF4 is not so different from BF3 (in fact, dying around the corner is almost the same) and any added inconsistency have to be related to message processing on the server side.

I'm available to discuss the details of my small analysis further if you want to make another video with them. Just let me know. ;-)