Call of Duty updates are notoriously huge. They’ve become so problematic to Australian networks that NBN Co called CoD out specifically when it announced its new Gigabit speed tier earlier this year. Patching may become a little easier in the future, with Aussie Broadband partnering with Activision-Blizzard to provide a dedicated pipe.
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Massive Call of Duty updates on the NBN
Aussie Broadband discussed the issue of mammoth game patches in a recent blog post. It talked about the connection issues that are caused when “game developers don’t offer alternative methods to receive the data.”
Without an alternative pathway, the traffic all ends up in the same place and the entire network suffers. Or to put it another way, someone’s Netflix may suddenly go to shit because elsewhere on the network a ton of people are trying to download a CoD update.
But the issues don’t end there.
Enough server capacity from the developers needs to be provided so an influx of users can successfully grab a patch without the download speed coming to a crawl.
So basically, there’s a the possibility of having problems on both ends.
“In the case of COD, the content is primarily delivered by their content delivery partner CenturyLink and their 100G, now 200G, link into IX Australia,” Aussie Broadband explains in the blog post. “With the amount of people trying to download the update, CenturyLink’s ports are full and pushed to capacity.”
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Double capacity for Activision-Blizzard data for Australian ISPs
So what’s the solution? At the moment, there’s two.
The first is more capacity for Activision-Blizzard data going to Australia through CenturyLink, a United States based infrastructure service provider. Activision-Blizzard already had a 100 gigabyte port with CenturyLink and now it will have two.
This move is designed to help Australian ISPs deal with massive Call of Duty updates and any other Activision-Blizzard games like WoW and Overwatch.
Aussie Broadband is getting a direct link to Activision-Blizzard
But that’s not all. Aussie Broadband is also partnering with Activision-Blizzard to alleviate the traffic caused by its big game patches (such as Call of Duty) from the rest of the network.
This basically means that when a patch drops Aussie Broadband users will have a direct pipe to Activision-Blizzard on top of the CenturyLink one. This will hopefully help ease overall network congestion.
“Activision-Blizzard appear to be trialling delivery of patches via their own content delivery network in conjunction with their existing arrangements. They have also agreed to having a private network interface directly with us,” Aussie Broadband said in the blog post.
“This means that we will have a private freeway just for our customers. This won’t completely bypass CenturyLink’s 200G ‘shared’ freeway, they will be used in conjunction to mutually benefit each other.”
“When our customers connect to our network to download the new update, they will be automatically sent to the dedicated freeway and CenturyLink’s freeway simultaneously, expanding the available capacity significantly and hopefully improving the overall patching experience with increased download speeds,”
This is quite a big deal and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in practice. Gizmodo Australia has reached out to Aussie Broadband regarding the timings around these new roll outs.
Fastest Aussie Broadband NBN Plans
And if you’re looking for the fastest NBN plans Aussie Broadband have on offer, here they are compared to other plans in Australia: