Peering and Caching for Epic Games, Fortnite, et al

Martijn Schmidt martijnschmidt at i3d.net
Tue Mar 23 15:33:57 UTC 2021


Hi folks,

To briefly clarify the "now mostly i3D" situation.. i3D.net was acquired by Ubisoft in 2019, and the reason why you're seeing Ubisoft's ASN disappearing from the IXPs where they were present is that we are integrating the networks. Ubisoft's prefixes are being announced downstream of i3D.net's AS49544 and continue to be reachable through a very long list of IXPs.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not all videogaming publishers have in-house game hosting capabilities, exactly because it is not easy to build the required global footprint to support this type of traffic with sufficient low-latency quality. Many will use external hosting providers, either bare metal or cloud. And although we are nowadays owned by Ubisoft, we still carry lots of non-Ubisoft videogames in our network since helping this industry attain low latency has always been and continues to be our core business.

Best regards,
Martijn

On 3/23/21 4:03 PM, Eric Dugas via NANOG wrote:
Agreed. The few good examples in Canada are Ubisoft/i3D (now mostly just i3D) and Riot Games. We don't have Valve or Blizzard here.

Epic Games seems to use Akamai for downloads/updates and AWS for backend so I don't see how you can cache/optimize latency other than getting in Akamai's own AANP program and peering with AWS.

Eric

On Mar 23 2021, at 10:05 am, Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net><mailto:nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
For an industry (online gaming) with the most "sensitive" customers to latency, packet loss, throughput, etc., the online gaming industry is terrible at peering. There are a few shining examples of what you should do, but then the rest is just content with buying transit from one, two, three players and calling it a day.



-----
Mike Hammett
Intelligent Computing Solutions
http://www.ics-il.com

Midwest-IX
http://www.midwest-ix.com

From: "Jose Luis Rodriguez" <jlrodriguez at gmail.com><mailto:jlrodriguez at gmail.com>
To: nanog at nanog.org<mailto:nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Monday, March 22, 2021 9:13:46 PM
Subject: Peering and Caching for Epic Games, Fortnite, et al

We run a healthy-sized ISP (say, 2.5M households, plus enterprise, etc ) and we really, REALLY want to make sure our users have an amazing experience when downloading the neverending Fortnite/Spacequest/Blizzard/DigDug  updates that run down our pipes. Would love to hear from others about how they're peering and caching -- not having the level of success I'd want with the typical "aggregators"  (they know who they are ) and would really like to link to the source even if it means trenching through the core of the Earth...

Would love pointers, names, or any leads, on or off list.

Thanks

Jose L. Rodriguez
CTO, Totalplay

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20210323/a11be37d/attachment.html>


More information about the NANOG mailing list