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Originally Posted by General Maximus
I was sitting at my PC hitting refresh in Steam as I am sure many other people were as well, waiting to download it. Now say for example 50,000 people wanted to download it in England. I very much doubt Steam had 50,000 x 150mbits (7.5tbits) of bandwidth just for that one game (they haven't got it at all).
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That would involve 50,000 saddos spending their whole evening hitting Refresh on Steam the entire time
A couple places where your case falls short though, Steam probably
do have enough bandwidth, given the average UK broadband speed is 25Mbps, not 150. And even on cable, most customers still stay on the lowest package, making the average just over 50Mbps. It's not unheard of to get 2Tbps or more over a single fibre, and Steam has several CDNs in the UK and a dozen or so more in neighbouring countries. Steam's own stats show average download speeds on VM are 35Mbps, only 16Mbps across the UK, and global traffic hitting nearly 2Tbps on a daily basis, with no indication it's anywhere near the limit.
Interestingly enough LINX traffic charts show a ~0.3Tbps bump around 8PM on Tuesday
To be fair though, I don't think KF2 is that popular a game to be making a huge impact. The all-time worldwide peak players count is barely 20,000 so the idea of 50,000 people downloading it at the same time in England alone is a bit far fetched.
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Even if Steam had oodles of bandwidth, lets say 200 people in Lincoln (where I live) wanted to download it. Just for us 200 people VM would have to have 30gbits of bandwidth going out of Lincoln through to their core to download that game at full speed and VM don't have that either.
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Again, assuming incorrectly, that everyone is on 150Mbps connections. Given the actual average of around 50Mbps, that'd "only" require 10Gbps of bandwidth "to their core".
Pretty much all core network links these days are a
minimum of 10Gbps, typically much more with major networks running multiple 40Gbps or 100Gbps links. Even a single mobile phone transmitter can get a 10Gbps connection put in by VM these days.
Any problems with congestion or capacity, if they exist, are nearly always on the local HFC node, not the core or backbone.
P.S. There's an average of about 30Gbps of Steam traffic going into the VM network 24/7 by the way, given the traffic patterns I wouldn't be surprised if it peaked at over 100Gbps some parts of the day.