Best ISP TelstraClear gives gamers great goodies

Steam is the hottest and best thing in online gaming and TelstraClear will soon be launching a New Zealand-based Steam content server to improve speeds and provide unmetered access to Steam users who are TelstraClear Broadband customers.

“Steam is the ultimate online game platform,” says Steve Jackson, TelstraClear consumer head. “Whether on a PC or Mac, Steam provides instant access to over 1100 games, with automatic game updates, as well as providing a gaming community including player chat. Obviously, these services take a lot of data.

“By building a New Zealand-based server we can help gaming customers on our network avoid game data counting towards their monthly data caps. When delivered from our server, gamers should also have faster access to the games they wish to play.”

Steam is one of the world’s most-used and fastest-growing computer-based game platforms. The TelstraClear Steam server is due to go live in the next month.

“There are often a couple of million users on the service at any one time and sometimes more than four million – about the population on New Zealand. We’ll soon have our Steam server online. With unmetered access for TelstraClear residential customers using the TelstraClear Steam content server, people can download and play games online without it adding to their data use.”

Because of the way that Steam’s client works, TelstraClear can’t guarantee that Steam won’t redirect customers to another server from time-to-time, which will then contribute to the user’s data cap.

“We advise customers using Steam to keep an eye on their online usage meter. We’ve built a solution that will mirror all of the available Steam games library, and most of the time data should be coming from our content server. But, sometimes, Steam will re-direct people as it tries to manage demand. Unfortunately, we have no control over this because it is how Steam works.”

People can learn more about Steam and register for a notification once the local content server goes live at www.telstraclear.co.nz/sub-sites/gaming-steam and they can ask questions in the TelstraClear powered ON3 Network gaming forums forums.on3network.co.nz/