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If his T-1 connection gets clogged or the Internet bogs down, the Hamilton Heights High School senior might get attacked by a vicious jungle troll or killed by a dagger-wielding, green-skinned orc. Or at least that's what could happen to his virtual counterpart, Sorell, a priest in the online game World of Warcraft.

"I don't play at home anymore because the lag time is so bad,'' Frytz says of the satellite-based Internet service that's available at his Strawtown, Ind., home. "Suddenly your character might jump 20 feet. If you're fighting a person with a better Internet connection, you die instantly.''

Meet the Internet's most demanding customers: Frytz and his buddies, who hang out at the Internet Atomic Gaming Cafe in Noblesville, Ind. Frytz is the owner of the cafe, which he opened with the help of investors in March to meet the high-speed network needs of Indianapolis-area online gamers.

Also: Role-playing games at a glance

"Most of my customers don't have broadband at home yet,'' says Frytz, who plays Internet games such as World of Warcraft four or five hours each day. "These people want the network to perform as if they are sitting side by side with the other players, as if they are on a LAN, even if the server is many states away.''

Gamers traditionally demand top-notch performance from their ISPs. But the latest crop of online games-dubbed MMORPGs, for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games - are pushing top-tier carriers to meet even higher requirements for bandwidth and speedy response times. The carriers able to meet these demands are winning lucrative Web hosting and managed services contracts from online gaming companies.

AT&T, for example, is providing Web hosting services for World of Warcraft, Asheron's Call: Throne of Destiny and the soon-to-be-released massively multiplayer versions of Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings. AT&T has set up a special network operations center in Bridgeton, Mo., to focus on meeting the performance and bandwidth needs of its online gaming customers.

"Because these clients have critical demand for bandwidth and network capacity on demand, not only do we have hosting resources and expertise but we've also created a special operations center for gaming customers,'' says Chris Costello, director of hosting and utility computing at AT&T. "This group has a deep level of networking expertise and offers special managed services and monitoring.''

AT&T provides managed Web hosting services to several online gaming companies, including Blizzard (maker of World of Warcraft), Turbine (maker of Asheron's Call) and Konami (maker of Yu-Gi-Oh). These and other gaming companies keep their servers at AT&T's Internet data centers, where the carrier monitors the systems around the clock.

On average, each online gaming company has more than 200 servers in AT&T's data centers and hosts an average of two of these centers (AT&T has 28 globally), the carrier says. At any given time a gaming company may have as many as 100,000 people playing their games simultaneously, according to AT&T.

The carrier provides bandwidth on demand so gaming companies can handle the rush of traffic they receive when a new version of a popular game is released. AT&T also offers these companies the ability to patch servers and troubleshoot network problems so in-house IT staff can focus on developing new features for their games.

In August, Konami Digital Entertainment signed a multiyear contract to host its North American gaming platform at AT&T's Redwood City, Calif., data center. The AT&T center complements and backs up Konami's primary data center in Toyko.

"Konami wants to focus on creating quality, cutting-edge games,'' says Daniel Laskowski, director of IT for Konami North America. "We don't want to get bogged down in billing and infrastructure. We wanted to partner with someone who can provide us with the high standards that we look for but has their core competence in data centers and network infrastructures worldwide.''

Laskowski says Konami has seen an improvement in the performance of Yu-Gi-Oh online since it began hosting the application with AT&T.

Using AT&T for Web hosting services also gives Konami the ability to quickly ramp up capacity to meet user demand. "As far as bandwidth and application-level processing, we won't get caught with our pants down,'' he says.

AT&T says online gaming is its most demanding vertical market in terms of network performance.

"These are very latency-sensitive applications,'' Costello says. "It's very different than checking e-mail. Users are not going to play the game again if their experience is slow because of latency problems.''

Costello says all of AT&T's enterprise customers are interested in such network performance metrics as latency, packet loss, availability and response time. But she says online gaming companies are more demanding about these metrics than retail, financial services, manufacturing and other industry segments.