Virgin Media hosted STEAM Content server?

[Gimpymoo]

Hi.

I started pushing this idea around 18 months ago with Virgin media.

http://community.virginmedia.com/t5/General-broadband-questions/Virgin-Media-hosted-STEAM-Content-server/td-p/171859


Virgin Media hosted STEAM Content server?
09-11-2010 20:31


Can someone at Virgin please look into this?

Surely someone at Virgin can see the benefits of this and it would give them some positive press within the gaming community too.

The server could be "Filtered" so only those "On network" would be using the server.

The benefits to customers would be a constant speed to the content server, without being at the mercy of time of day or BIG game releases when using the public content servers.

All customers using Steam would benefit as downloads would be "local".

The benefit to Virgin as an ISP would be LESS "external" traffic which I assume would be cheaper for them.

If anyone is interested, there is information here:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3326-TDKV-4603

Thoughts?

Can anyone forward this to those with the power to investigate the posibilities?

I will gladly help myself in any way possible if it would help.

Virgin + Valve = WIN

It has been a slow process thus far with Virgin now claiming that Valve have not replied to them.

As discussed in the thread above, a Valve staffer has supplied an alternate email address for Virgin to contact them on.

If anyone feels this would benefit them, please post in the Virgin community thread as to keep the idea alive and show the decision makers at Virgin that this idea does indeed have value.

If RPS feels this is "front page" worthy, that would also be awesome.

Many thanks.

[Heliocentric]

I'm with sky atm, but if this was adopted it would encourage me to transfer over.

Surely mine is the kind of testimonial that would turn their heads.

[Gimpymoo]

Well, the two parties now seem to have the correct details so all we can do now is wait.

[Mistabashi]

Not sure I really see the benefit, since Steam's own servers almost always max out my connection anyway. Unless it would circumvent VM's rather restrictive "traffic management" policy so I didn't have to do large Steam downloads overnight.

[Gimpymoo]

That is the EXACT point of it.

Any traffic would be "internal" and should not be within the remit of current traffic management.

[baboonanza]

Would it though? My understanding was that traffic management wasn't so much to do with external transfer as managing load at individual exchanges. I am not an expert though.

[Mistabashi]

Would it though? My understanding was that traffic management wasn't so much to do with external transfer as managing load at individual exchanges. I am not an expert though.

Well, it's probably more about external traffic as that's what costs them money. But as a VM customer who is currently experiencing appalling packet loss during evenings & weekends I can tell you that local traffic is a big problem on Virgin media's network, so I really don't see the benefit in VM hosted content servers, in fact there's a very real chance that they would have a negative impact.

[Axyl]

VMs 50MB Fibre Optic package (aka XL) has no traffic shaping applied to it.

I've been taking full advantage of that for over 6 months now.

That being said however, I fully support this idea and will post over at the VC forums later on. Nice idea, Gimpymoo :)