Steam as an online market place for PC gaming and growing at an amazing rate, now #Valve has decided to employ Level 3 Communications to add extra bandwidth —100 Gbps in fact! That’s some #serious #traffic bandwidth.
News comes from a Level 3 press release, which explained Steam’s traffic increase by about 75 percent every year. Which is 450 to 500 petabytes of data each month, due to the 10GB to 40GB game file sizes featured in its catalogue. Plus Steam sees “over 100 million users, averaging more than 10 million concurrent players and over two billion minutes played logged per day.”
Earlier this month, Steam set a new record of over 12.3 million concurrent users on its servers.
Valve executive Mike Dunkle explained in the release, Level 3 Communications is “one of the few providers that offers 100 Gbps Internet ports, which are now a critical component of our network infrastructure.”
- Level 3’s network of 100 Gbps Internet ports is available in 26 markets across North America and Europe.
- Level 3’s global IP backbone capacity is more than 42 Terabits per second (Tbps).
- Valve’s Steam gaming platform has over 100 million users, averaging more than 10 million concurrent players and over two billion minutes played logged per day.
- Traffic levels to Steam’s servers are growing approximately 75 percent year-over-year.
- Steam averages approximately 450-500 petabytes (PB) of data worldwide per month and four to five exabytes (EB) of data per year.
- Steam’s standard game release can use 10-40 gigabytes (GB) of data per user download.
- The global games market is expected to bring in nearly $75 billion.
The increased popularity of Valve servers, it’s only necessary to increase the capacity of the Internet infrastructure and expanding to new pipes. A rough comparison to Steam’s peak bandwidth usage over the past couple of days was highlighted via TechSpot), this new change should be enough to handle the ever-growing user base.
The 100 Gbps pipes will be available across 26 markets throughout North America and Europe. How many pipes Valve has bought remains uncertain but it is likely to be a lot.
