Re: Peering and Caching for Epic Games, Fortnite, et al

[Martijn Schmidt via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

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 () ics-il net><mailto:nanog () 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 () gmail com><mailto:jlrodriguez () gmail com>
To: nanog () nanog org<mailto:nanog () 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