Update on the most anticipated server setup of 2010: STEAM in the FreeZone

[WAJohnathan]

Shortly after the launch of WAGE, mid December 2009, Web Africa announced that a local STEAM content server would be made available to their customers and be hosted within the FreeZone. Once the server had been setup in the WA data centre and Valve’s engineers had configured the server to begin fetching content, Web Africa set up monitoring; to see how quickly the content was syncing to the new server. The dowmload from the master server in Seattle proved to be very slow, with the average transfer rate ranging from 1 to 3 Mb/s, between the two servers.

Web Africa promptly contacted VALVE; and together started investigating ways to speed up the process. Although the initial attempts did not yield much better results, Web Africa was able to arrange multiple data streams from Valve and the WA Steam content server is now streaming the data at a significantly greater speed as a result.

As the server rapidly ascends toward the 3.5 Terrabyte mark, with new content arriving on a daily basis, gamers can look forward to taking advantage of STEAM downloads within the FreeZone in the very near future. Below is a snap shot of 1 minute and 12 seconds worth of traffic to wet your appetites.

[Xharlie]

No indication of when it will become a reality? At least you could give us an "at the current rate, we expect to... around the ?th of ..."

[Slowlineman]

They probably don't want to set an estimate, if something happens to slow progress and it doesn't happen by the forecasted date they will attract negative attention, everyone would probably piss themselves and act all ungrateful and snotty.

Anyway it's looking good to me.

I'm not so good at maths so someone may be able to correct me, but I think 3.5tb at that rate should take about 10 days. Take into account it's been syncing for a while already plus they said they were flying in discs (though maybe they stopped that as the speed is increased?), it should be quicker than that. Still 10 days is great.

[Xharlie]

No disagreement there - that graph looks fantastic.

(Some quick button-mashing on a calculator shows that it doesn't actually take too long to copy 3.5 TB at 16 Mbps.)

[Recoil]

Looking Good here as well .... Damn Steam and your specials ......

[Slowlineman]

Something that I have been thinking about, the next thing we need to do is get Steam to accept some other payment options so it's easier for us to give them money.

This thread, though really old (which probably means it's not happening anymore) http://forums.steampowered.com/forum...d.php?t=478297, says they were going to start taking bank transfers.

I guess with the possibility of Paypal coming through here now though it doesn't matter as much (if Paypal does come through, and depending on the conditions as it seems to be an FNB thing). I was thinking maybe we could try asking them to look into moneybookers, it's better locally supported as you can transfer from an SA bank account.

Anyone have any opinions on that, or have any other ideas? I was kind of thinking maybe WA could pull some strings on these issues, but don't think that's really a possibility. Sorry for derailing the thread.

[CrAzYLeGs69]

so, is the pre-paid BW thing sorted out already?

[Blade-Titan]

WOW 233mb per second
How much is left to copy though

[Micta]

Is it just me, or does it say they only have 233mb of it so far?
Sheepsticks, I don't wanna sound like a brat, but I almost got excited. xD

Edit:

No wait, I see now. From what I calculated, it'd take 3 days to download 1tb, 6 days for 2tb, and 9 days for 3.5tb...
So let's hope they started already.

[Blade-Titan]

Will it be up before the bf bc2 release ?

[CrAzYLeGs69]

If you look at the left of the graph, then u'll see that it's actually 16MB/s.

[Blade-Titan]

nope it sais it dwnls 233mb in 1 min 12 sec

[Blade-Titan]

can we also get info everyday? on progress? and if speeds drop or get faster plz?

[Blade-Titan]

oh i though they started before cristmas wtf, so they lied D:
owel atleast i know they startin now and that on the side that 16mb is how much they dwnl in a sec which is 16 mb/s

[s.burrell.rsa]

At 16Mbps:

1 Day = 172.8Gbytes
6 Days = 1.036Tbytes
21 Days = 3.628Tbytes

Will take just under 1 month to populate the Content Server, from a start point at that speed, ofc they have been populating it at a lower speed for some time, so these are irrelevant.

[JaredB]

16Mb/s x 60s = 960Mb/min
960Mb/min x 60min = 57,600Mb/hour
57,600Mb/hour = 56.25Gb/hour
56.25Gb/hour x 24hours = 1350Gb/day
1350Gb/day = 1.32Tb/day

My calculation says the server will be filled within 2.5 days, but they'll more than likely still have tons of testing to do so lets all just hold on and wait for a bit.

[s.burrell.rsa]

lol, your calculations are wrong, 16Mega Bit (not Mbyte) is 2Mbytes/s

8 bits in a byte. ie, just divide the already (16x10^6) by 8, 2Mbytes/s

[Blade-Titan]

how du you get that, they dwnl 233mb in a min acording to graph so theyre not dwnl @ 16mb/s so sometins wrong

and Jared your calculations are right

Burrel.sa yours are wrong

[Blade-Titan]

ag damn why bits

i though its megabytes wtf is with this

[Blade-Titan]

well this sucks a month to get steam dwnls on freezone D:

why didnt they do this december