The Colorado company that powers Steam, the popular online gaming portal and store, increased Steam’s Internet link big time — to 100 gigabits per second.
Valve, which operates Steam, upgraded its connection from Broomfield’s Level 3 Communications, which owns or manages a huge chunk of the world’s Internet backbone. Previously, Valve had a 10 gbps link.
Gamers should see faster downloads of game content and less lag from spotty connections, said Mike Dunkle, who’s responsible for Valve’s business development and Internet infrastructure.
“The impact for Steam users is the availability for higher throughput rates for downloads and lower latency when playing online games,” he said in an e-mail.
Valve, based in Bellevue, Wash., needed a peppier connection to accommodate a growing number of gamers. Traffic to Steam’s servers is growing 75 percent a year. In an average month, Steam sees 450 to 500 petabytes of data use. That’s nearly 524 million gigabytes. Most games released on Steam are 10 to 40 gigabytes.
