With the majority of people working from home and so many people killing time streaming music, movies and games, networks are hit with intense amounts of traffic. Hopefully these measures will help preserve network stability so people can continue enjoying them. Microsoft hasn’t announced any updates regarding Xbox’s network services in the US. That said, PlayStation gamers hoping to play Doom Eternal this weekend may want to start their download sooner rather than later, and Xbox gamers might want to download the game while Xbox Live is still operating at full speed.

Telecommunications companies are bracing themselves for a surge in usage as people now work from home to reduce the risk of infection. School closures around the country also mean there are more kids than usual using the services. As such, it’s likely that other carriers will soon be making their own applications for additional capacity.

To keep your browser from stealing resources, the GX control panel lets you set how much CPU power or RAM it can use. That means you can leave it running during gaming sessions, confident it won’t overwhelm your machine. On top of that, Twitch is integrated directly into the sidebar, and you get shortcuts to Discord, Reddit and other sites, along with Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook.

To set the right mood, you can also customize Opera GX with a huge color palette, sound effects and wallpapers. It also has a built in ad-blocker, browser VPN and a “GX Corner” that hosts gaming news and deals feeds.

Opera also did some surveys and revealed a ton of statistics on PC gaming, noting that 82 percent of PC gamers are on Windows and 14 percent on macOS. About 49 percent have had technical issues, with 30 percent troubled by network problems, 26 percent having memory issues and 14 percent CPU problems. Opera GX for macOS is now available to download here.

Now a team from MIT have come up with a tool to help multiple people share a limited WiFi connection. The group from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed the Minerva system which analyzes videos before playing them to check how much they would be impacted by being played at a lower quality.

Traditional protocols for WiFi sharing simply split the available bandwidth by the number of users. So if you’re trying to watch an HD sports match on your TV and one of your kids is trying to watch a cartoon on their smartphone, you’ll each be allocated half the available bandwidth. That’s fine for your kid but terrible for you, as fast-moving videos like sports events suffer more from low bandwidth than other types of videos like cartoons.

Minerva can analyze both videos in an offline phase to see which would benefit from being allocated more bandwidth and which could be served using lower bandwidth without the quality suffering. The protocol then assigns bandwidth based on the needs of the different users, and will adjust itself over time in response to the video content being played.

In real-world tests, Minerva was able to reduce rebuffering time almost by half, and in one third of cases was able to offer improvements to video playback quality that were the equivalent of going from 720p to 1080p. And the system doesn’t only work within households. The same principle could be used to share internet connections across entire regions, making it ideal for companies like Netflix and Hulu which have to serve video to large numbers of users.

The system can be introduced by video providers without needing to change any hardware, making it essentially a “drop-in replacement for the standard TCP/IP protocol” according to the team.