With the first day having seen the tournaments postponed and a series of network issues there has been little by way of a response from Multiplay as they worked through the night to ensure the game of catch up would be successful.

However, someone did find the time to explain the situation over on our sister site Tek-9.org and it couldn't have come from a better source - the i-series network manager. Left in the comments section of the first blog from Matt "wargasm" Hazell, the detailed response made it quite clear what had caused the problems so far.

The response read:

Hi guys,

Just wanted to post some specifics on the problems that have no doubt affected all of you today that we've had with the internet connection and what we're going to do about it. I appreciate it's difficult when stuff doesn't work right and I fully understand peoples frustration - especially when we're all often too busy trying to work around issues instead of being able to communicate with you guys in the best possible way.

As i'm sure you all know, we were lucky enough to be offered a sponsorship deal with Demon internet this event, who have provided us with a very generous 1gb/sec internet connection for the i-Series. For the past several years, we've used a 100meg circuit - so the new line represents a 10 fold increase. Normally these kinds of lines take months to get installed, but Demon have managed to get the one we're using installed in a fraction of the time - which is no mean feat when you consider all the different telcos and work required to get the job done.

However, since setup for the event, we've seen several times when the line has dropped into a state where it starts dropping about 70% of the packets inbound for us. We've had engineers on site during setup for i40 who cleared the fault, which was somewhere in the transmission between Newbury and the Cable and Wireless network in Bracknell. Unfortunately the same problem re-occured again Thursday evening during EAS. Cable and Wireless had engineers investigating until the early hours of Friday morning, but the fault suddenly cleared itself about 02:30. Investigations by C&W continued, but with the fault cleared they couldn't identify the exact nature of the problem. We hoped all would be well - but once again, early this afternoon we saw the exact same problem re-occur.

We took the decision soon after this to make some pretty major changes to the i40 network and re-direct our traffic over the 100meg link we still have. This is the state we are still in right now and is, of course, resulting in slow downloads and poor performance. 100m/bit between 2000+ people is not a lot each - which is why we were all so excited by the Demon line - we know what a bottleneck the internet would be at 100m/bit. We prioritize gaming traffic over bulk traffic (like web and Steam - which we restrict down) so hopefully things work well enough, but of course it's far from ideal.

HOWEVER - the good news is that Demon / Cable and Wireless are now confident they've located and resolved the fault. A physical piece of hardware in their transmission network has been replaced and they think it's very likely the problem will be resolved. The issue has been escalated to very high up - and they really have been working hard to resolve the problem for us. There have been many engineers for different parts of the network working on isolating the issue literally 24hours a day (and i've had several phone calls regarding it at 03:30, 06:30 etc). Hopefully this has now paid off.

Therefore, overnight tonight C&W are going to be running load tests for us remotely. If everything still looks good in the morning and they give me the nod, we'll be moving our traffic back to the Demon line early tomorrow morning. As long as everything holds up overnight tonight, we're quietly hopeful that the line will be in a usable state for us for the rest of the LAN.

I hope you have all managed to get some good LAN games going today anyway and i'm really sorry that these issues have affected the LAN for you. If you have any questions please feel free to post in this thread and i'll do my best to answer them for you. I'm off to bed shortly, I've had a very very long day and need to get up early in the morning to arrange the swap back - so apologies if I don't post much more this evening.

Thanks for your patience today.

Cheers,
Giles.

The admins are meeting up this morning to form a battle plan and ensure that the event runs smoothly as any other delays at this stage could prove a bridge too far if the tournament wants to conclude in regualtion time.