GameRail

[qwidjib0]

Well there's latency-critical, and then there's that market of gamers that will send you a traceroute with an 8ms ping and demand you fix it in within 1 hour or to stop ruining their life, swearing in all caps in the process.

 

There are plenty of networks out there that work great for the latency-critical market without what is essentially a VPN service which attempted to be pushed on a high enough % of both clients and providers to make a difference. In those traces posted here, it succeeds at reducing hops, but doesn't do much to anything for latency- and Gary was right, in those cases, that doesn't help a thing. Other under-discussed factors like congestion and packet loss- securing network consistency like Internap FCP or Mzima/Force10 sFlow, I don't believe it presented a solution for either. Sure, a low ping is nice, but if one in every 20 pings you make is 250ms, or drops entirely - you're no better off. There are better methods than just reducing hops, and they've now existed for a long time.

 

If you take a step back and analyze their business model, however- network POPs in 8 to 17 locations with their own private fiber routes; some respectable, redundant routing gear and xconnects all over the place.. developers for the software, enough staff to manage everything, and the promotional resources to launch an entire new industry. The recurring expenses of that business would have to be in at least the mid to high $XXX,XXX/month range, potentially higher. I don't know of any exclusive GSP's for which that sort of infrastructure expense makes sense, and while I don't know for sure how many people subscribed to it, it would have to be far more paying subscribers than most any of the largest GSP's have right now, even if the entire possible market paid what they're asking now; and again this is all for something not critical or in many cases even beneficial to game play.

[jbiloh]

They're gaming sector closed, doesn't necessarily mean their private network has. I wouldn't be surprised if they're just moving on to another industry, one that's "ready to support a standalone network"

 

Correct.

[bfarrell]

I had heard the complete opposite actually, would be beneficial to atleast get something out of the work they did......There arn't to many industries that are 'latency critical' though, that I can think of.

 

I think we'd both agree that going to another sector doesn't necessarily entail their latency geared optimization, but the private network feel and ability to transfer data in a more 'secure' and 'private' fashion.