Are people ramping up this?
The SSL/TLS of all things have nuked most of this without help from upstreams like getting dedicated boxes from CDN and provider services.
Not as easy to put an HTTP proxy inline anymore and get significant bandwidth savings.
But wouldn’t something like LanCache work for ISPs too to cache the main game CDNs?
All technology specific. That works and requires DNS as far as I’m aware. As long as your customers are using your DNS you’d have the option to use that.
Either way it’s a game of managing all of these specific types of caches. Another example that scales better than that is caching for Apple updates, I think that still requires an Apple OS X box though.
Yes, it works by pointing the CDN names to your cache. Those servers are cleartext.
https://github.com/uklans/cache-domains
If someone uses a non-ISP DNS server it is their problem, most home users won’t bother doing that.
I saw an unrelated example of setting the DNS server address in a PS4 to download much faster from somewhere else.
If you want the maintenance burden I’d say do it. The only way I’d really consider it is if their were other constraints like significant geographical latency or am inability to obtain more transport. This is because the maintenance burden of keeping up with too many individual, custom, caching techniques has a cost too. It takes the shape of reputational damage when a customer experiences an issue due to your caching middleware. You also experience cost when someone does bother to call you for support and you have to spend time troubleshooting. Caching doesn’t mean free bandwidth but in some situations it may be cheaper to try. That’s a calculation you have to make though.
But if you can serve content faster than the CDN would, it is a marketing tool.
PSN is temporarily reducing download speeds in Europe given that the EU asked streaming services to consume less bandwidth.
MS and Akamai will also be managing game downloads if there’s congestion.
Steam would saturate a 500 Mbps connection a while back.
More recently I have not seen it download more than half as quickly.
I checked and the content comes from the CDN far away, there’s no “local” server.
I started monitoring some weeks ago and I am paying for too much bandwidth.
Some online games are overloaded, not downloads.
I found a Mikrotik DNS example thread:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/lancache-steam-riot-others-nginx-proxy/83850/1
But you can also just use lancache as DNS proxy.
Note that some game download clients will use HTTPS if the cache IP address is public, so an ISP could not simply use the standard config.
I see people complaining that PSN downloads are really slow.
And many people don’t understand why they have to delete stuff to download a “small” update.
Steam is also doing some bandwidth management unrelated to their capacity.