Play games faster on Steam with Valve + Level 3 Communications
The company that powers and store, has increased its 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 10 gbps links.
Gamers should see faster downloads of game content, plus less lag from spotty connections, said Mike Dunkle, Valve’s Business Development, 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.
This doesn’t change how many users can be on Steam simultaneously.
But because the connection is bigger, the “100G connects will have lower congestion then 10G connects,” he said.
Valve needed a peppier connection because of the “substantial rise in popularity of digital services and online games provided by Steam,” according to .
Traffic to Steam’s servers is growing 75 percent a year. Steam averages 450 to 500 petabytes of data worldwide per month. That’s between 471.9 million to 524 million gigabytes. And for those counting, Steam’s annual data total is four to five exabytes per year, or 4 billion to 5 billion gigabytes!
Most of the games released on Steam, however, are a mere 10 to 40 gigabytes.
Level 3, which operates a massive Internet backbone that consumer ISPs and other companies get its Internet from, shared a few choice bits about that pipe: Its backbone capacity is more than 42 terabits per second, which is faster than a home user’s typical 25 mbps.
The Level 3 upgrade has already begun, Dunkle added.
“Yes, we currently have 100G links with Level 3 in Europe and plan to add more in Europe and the US,” he said.
