Pepwave Solution for Larian Studios

Larian Studios is a growing gaming development company that does its own publishing as well, meaning business continuity relies on stable connectivity round the clock, 24/24 7/7.

The different teams work around the clock syncing essential data necessary for the development of the game around the globe between Larian offices and external parties who join us in the development.

With the growth of the company we expanded offices, and thus our Dublin office moved to a bigger one. When we moved we had 2 VDSL connections available and in use, Eir and VirginMedia.

Giving us:

• Eir 100/10
• VirginMedia 300/50

The ISP gave us a 12 weeks or longer lead time to install dedicated Fiber cable. Thus we kept using the low tier business solutions with VDSL in the meantime. An office with 35+ people doing revisioned data syncing globally this connection failed to withhold the throughput on the VirginMedia Docsys 3.0 Motorola Modem. Pushing Terabytes of raw data a month through one cable gave us latency and blackouts for hours multiple times a week.

The new IT Manager knew and had experience with Peplink’s Speedfusion technology that is as robust and scalable as a network manager needs. The company in its growth had no trust in new brands and infrastructure investments on a day 1 provided/suggested solution, Frontier BV was able to rent us a Pepwave MAX HD4 that had the capacity we desired in the office with extra data centers for bonding and exit nodes virtualized.

Once we received the equipment the installation found place within the day and the office was offline for 0 seconds. We used a secondary WAN on our gateway attached to the Pepwave MAX HD4 in combination with 2 VDSL+ lines and 2 sim cards. SD-WAN functionality is a breeze with Pepwave, but with the assistance of Frontier BV we got the pepwave up and running the same day and actively working.

The following day we we’re going to swap from VirginMedia to the Pepwave with a bonding solution, as the CEO was present in this office I made a bet: I will cut the ethernet cable of WAN1 once we run on the Pepwave, while we video call and developers are syncing data to our 5 data centers, and we will stay online. I betted for my job position as a joke, but I was sweating as I neared towards the server room. Video calling with the CEO who was in a room with all the people, being filmed. We swapped to WAN2 on the gateway, and we are office wide on the pepwave now. No package loss, and then I took the cisors, and cut the cable to our primary modem...and we stayed online!

As soon as I came upstairs from the basement; I was greeted with cheers and applause from the office: ONLINE.

In the following period we went from 3-5 outages a week to not a single outage till the Dedicated Fiber cable was installed. Which took a total of 18~ weeks!

My trust in the Peplink brand and the technology they have developed over the years was already there from a previous job position, but all the sceptic people in the office where very satisfied afterwards with the performance of this technology.

When we as a studio face another connectivity challenge in the future, Peplink, their SD-WAN technology and the service of Frontier BV has proven itself!