Haste email

Hello,

We totally understand your initial reaction.  The inventor of Haste actually created Haste because he tried other products and they didn't fix his lag.  I appreciate that you gave us the opportunity to share what we're doing.  I'm also a network engineer, and I too was skeptical at first.

From our research, WTFast appears to be a series of VPN connections that change your route to a game server.  However, these routes aren't intelligently created and they often slow down your performance because VPNs simply weren't built for real-time applications like multiplayer games.  Of course, they were designed for enterprises to secure and expand their networks.  A lot of similar products also seem to use a similar approach.

So instead of using off-the-shelf technology like VPN, we created our own software-defined networking platform to intelligently optimize connectivity.  From an infrastructure standpoint, we operate our own high-performance mesh network using carrier-grade, low-latency Juniper routers and premium fiber optic routes.  The only traffic on our network is the small UDP packets for our users' games.  No large packets or TCP packets that could negatively impact someone's real-time application.  The fiber optic routes we use offer the lowest latency and jitter available.  For example, we are on the single fastest route that exists between Chicago and New York.  The only other people on this route are high-frequency trading companies.

In addition to having an awesome private fiber network, we also do some cool things that nobody else appears to be doing.  The best example of this is our multipathing technology.  In order to provide connection stability for UDP (think reduced packet loss and jitter), we actually replicate your game packets before they leave your computer.  With 3-4 copies of your packet, we are able to route your data diversely through the public Internet and our private network in parallel.  The packet that arrives next to the game server the fastest gets delivered, and the rest are ignored.  So if 3 of the 4 copies fail to arrive because of packet loss, well, you haven't really lost a packet.  This works in reverse too.  The game server sends us your single packet, we replicate it in our network, and route it diversely in parallel to your PC.  The packet that arrives first is delivered and the others are ignored.

Finally, we don't let users choose "servers" or "routes" for their games like other services do.  For us, the default settings in those applications usually resulted in not being able to connect to the game.  So we do something called intelligent path selection.  Using telemetry data from your Haste client, we're able to measure your connectivity to the various parts of our network.  Whenever you start a game on Haste, we assign the best routes we have available based on the current state of the Internet, our network, and your network.  If we happen to find better routes for you as your game continues, we will swap them out accordingly, completely transparent to your game.  We are also working on dynamic path creation, where instead of assigning you the best paths available, we create them on-the-fly for each individual user as we see fit.  However, this requires more connectivity diversity on our end.  We are continuously testing new services providers to see how we can provide users with better paths.  For example, we are currently testing a low-latency fiber network that uses new physical routes that shave off a few milliseconds from the current best route between those two cities.  This would provide us with another route option that we absolutely know that no other service provider is using -- we would be the first.  In addition to having 3-4 diverse routes through our network to the game server, we also provide you with a direct route from your PC to our servers in the game server facility (yeah, we're in the same buildings as the game servers just a few fractions of a millisecond away from them).  For some people, their best route happens to be their ISP's route to our well-connected content servers, not through our private network.

So far, we have been able to accomplish all of this without any special access or knowledge from the game companies.  We have no direct connectivity to Riot or Blizzard's networks, no API access, etc.  Even with Riot Direct being so awesome, we are still able to reduce ping and packet loss for certain users.  In our conversations with Riot, they seemed enthusiastic about our ability to optimize beyond what Riot Direct can do.

I realize this is a lot of information, but I hope it makes sense.  In terms of the company, we're graduates of Techstars Cloud and currently operate out of the Atlanta Technology Development Center.  We've raised $2.5m from investors and are presenting at SXSW as finalists very soon.  You can find some links to external articles about Haste at https://haste.net/news.

Joey Benamy
Haste / Thalonet, Inc.
Joey@haste.net