Ireland upgrading Net infrastructure to host SWTOR EU servers

Found this after reading this thread then this article and found it really interesting - thought it deserved its own thread

Not sure whether its a good thing or not. I mean its cool that Ireland is upgrading infrastructure for this, but that comes with all sorts of troubles of its own.

I mean, they're not just putting in some big internet pipes to the datacentre which can be linked into an existing network that can support it, they are upgrading the whole countries infrastructure, probably upgrading the available bandwidth to the whole country and improving backbones etc.... thats pretty damn complicated stuff

Very cool that the servers will be close to me in England though

 

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DE: The question was about European servers. 

 

SR: I'm going to tell you where the European servers are, but you're not allowed to freak out. The European servers are going to be located in Ireland, in Dublin.

DE: Don't tell them the address, they'll go now. Mission impossible. 

SR: And here's the reason you're not allowed to freak out. Ireland, as a country, is upgrading its internet infrastructure for our game. Which is a big damn deal, right? I had a conversation with the guy who's doing the server build a few months ago. They were talking about the fact that if you look at the gap in time between when we were guessing to launch and then when we were starting to do our servers, because you're obviously locking down the server hardware and what you need to buy and everything else. The time between that point and launch is so small that we are ramping up and buying hardware faster than any tech project ever. Faster than Google. Faster than Facebook. And this is what we're hearing from the server guys who are working on it, they're like, "This is unprecedented scaling you're talking about." So when you combine that and you go to the Irish government or whoever it is who runs internet in Ireland, and you say, "Hey, look at the bandwidth requirements of our game." And they're like, "Uhm, we might need to get something bigger than a T1 line." So they are literally upgrading the internet infrastructure of the country itself. Which I think is damn cool. And then the US servers are going to be on east coast and west coast. So it doesn't really matter where. Any major metropolitan city in that case is going to be fine.

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