[AusNOG] Australian Steam Content Mirrors

[Joshua D'Alton]

Pretty much on the ball, although think you'll find valve5/6 are behind
highwinds, not their CDN product indeed just their bandwidth, but meh.

I've heard from another person that steam got an agreement with a few
providers like highwinds to soak up excess bandwidth which looked very
attractive to steam compared to their outgoings for various caches, but
quality has been greately decreased in some markets, like AU, just not
their core which is why they've gotten away with it.

So yea, steam went on a cost-cutting spree and we're suffering as a result.
Frankly it'd still be possible to have ISP caches at 0 cost to steam aside
from management, but said person has indicated they don't really care.
Shame :(


On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 9:03 PM, Damian Guppy <the.damo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey Daniel,
>
> Around June / July this year valve migrated off of their old distribution
> system based around proprietary 'steam cache' servers to what they call
> "SteamPipe" which is a HTTP based CDN. When I last checked in early august
> only 10% or less traffic continued over the old steamcache system.
>
> Steampipe itself is broken into 2 subsystems - Valves in house HTTP CDN
> and third party CDN's. The traffic split between these two systems is
> approximately 67% to 33% when i last looked. Valves in house system are all
> servers that fall below the subdomain of *.cs.steampowered.com and
> australia currently hosts 3 of these servers -
> Valve217.cs.steampowered.com, Valve5.cs.steampowered.com and
> Valve6.cs.steampowered.com. The third party system is currently a mix of
> 6 vendors at last check using the naming system content*.steampowered.com.
> Each of these content 'servers' is mapped to a different global CDN and
> each one serves a different set of content - IIRC content1 servers
> authentication and store traffic, and content 3 and content7 serve game
> files. Content7 is the namespace for Akamai, Content1 is Limelight, 2 is
> Footprint, 3 is HighWinds, 4 is EdgeCast, and 5 is Amazon. 6 is now
> decommissioned and no longer in rotation.
>
> In short, it is basically impossible for any consumer ISP to cache all of
> steam, the best they can do is host a bunch of the third party CDN's such
> as akamai and hope to get lucky and serve maybe 40% of steams traffic
> (although in my experience ISP's dont count akamai as freezone / unmetered)
>
> --Damian
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 17, 2013 at 6:47 PM, Daniel Watson <daniel at glovine.com.au>wrote:
>
>>  Hi Guys
>>
>>  I was wondering if anybody on-list may know of any other Steam content
>> providers other then the obvious IINET, Internode or Telstra based services
>> run by those types of ISP's? and if they know the URL's?
>>
>>  Daniel
>>
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>
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