And pay an obscenely high amount of money for bandwidth? Those providers all charge at least $0.05/GB; you can get bandwidth for a tenth of that elsewhere. Games use a lot of bandwidth at scale (agar.io would use a couple of PB a month). For F2P games, server costs eat a lot of revenue if you use those premium providers.
Not to the datacenters, just to the POPs or edge nodes, after that, it is all private networks. And, afaik, the distance to the closest pop or edge node is a small share of the total distance to the datacenters.
We are measuring significant latency reductions for real players to google data centers right now. You seem to be overestimating how perfectly anycast finds the best PoP to get on the private network. You also assume that google’s private network is optimal from every point on the USA to their own data centers. This is not true. What’s better that google’s network? Everybody else’s, and google’s network, evaluated once every 10 seconds.
You didn't, you just hand-waved and threw some claims around without any data to back it up, and you didn't address the key issue: you don't have access to datacenters, only to POPs.
> We are measuring significant latency reductions for real players to google data centers right now.
Again, you only have visibility to the POPs, so you're only seeing improvements on the path to the POP.
For example: there is no Google POP anywhere near its Oregon datacenter[1]. You literally can't just push your traffic to the Dalles and plug into the datacenter.
So, no matter where your customer is, you can only improve the traffic to the Seattle or the Bay Area POPs, where the traffic will move over to Google's private network.
As I understood it, they are measuring the latency to game servers located in googles datacenter. This is why they are talking about that. They cant measure game latency to a PoP, because the game server isn't at the PoP.
Instead of routing to the nearest PoP, they route to the PoP that provides the lowest latency to their game server. I don't understand the confusion. They are simply measuring latency over a number of different routes and choosing the optimal one (for their use case).
Maybe you are assuming that there is no latency between the PoPs and the datacentres? I can assure you thats not the case.
