On 2/13/20 12:39 PM, Ahmed Borno wrote:
Strictly out of interest, I wanted to ask earlier if this irresponsible way of causing insane, instant, bandwidth demands is breaking anything on the ISP/CDN side or even the console owner ?! Or is it just an interesting phenomenon that is handled without a sweat. Does it break the buck in anyway?
A good service provider will plan for things like this. They do happen from time to time and for reasons other than large game updates being dropped in the middle of the afternoon. However, sudden large traffic surges can be unexpected, causing network congestion and poor performance for customers, and regardless they cost money to plan for. These game updates have become very visible recently which I suspect is why they're getting attention. They've also been generating traffic surges during or near prime time which compounds with typical streaming usage and is most likely to generate customer complaints. If they were hitting at 4AM local, hence the discussion about consoles and such downloading them automatically at night, it wouldn't be nearly as big of a deal since network demand is typically low during those times on consumer-facing networks and congestion, if it occurs, is unlikely to generate complaint volume. -- Brandon Martin