About Internap

The Problem

For NCsoft, a leading online computer game developer, it’s all about giving their customers the best gaming experience possible. In order for end-users to truly enjoy the dynamic action, vivid scenarios and interactive real-time competitions of the company’s popular role-playing games, NCsoft needed to provide uninterrupted connectivity and instant response times – all the time. Quite a challenge when you have to keep tens of thousands of gamers connected to the same “massive multiplayer online role-playing game” (MMORPG) simultaneously.

Internap Solution

NCsoft needed to insulate their millions of end-users worldwide from the latency, jitter and packet loss that can occur across the Internet at any given moment. To ensure continuous high-performance connectivity, they needed a highly intelligent network optimization system with capabilities far beyond Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the standard Internet protocol that bases its routing solely on the shortest distance or least number of “hops” between points.

Three Internap® Flow Control Platform^TM (FCP) devices were installed at the NCsoft data centers in Los Angeles and Washington, DC. This patented route optimization solution continuously monitors and automatically redistributes connectivity across multiple ISP links based on optimal performance and cost efficiencies, compared to BGP, which traffics according to the shortest route. The Internap FCP solution uses the path diversity and built-in redundancy of NCsoft’s multi-homed network to route around congestion in the vast “middle mile” of the Internet – reducing network latency and avoiding downtime due to outages, brownouts or other factors.