The metaverse is infrastructure

The metaverse is infrastructureSkip to main content

Presented by Subspace 

The metaverse is not an application that runs on top of a service. It’s not a world, and it’s not a game. It’s the next iteration of the internet that supports real-time experiences. The metaverse is infrastructure.

The internet was born in the early 1970s as a way for the military to reliably share information between computers engaged in defense research scattered across the country. Since that time, consumer demands continue to grow, but the internet was never designed for real-time interactions. The next generation of real-time applications requires a network that prioritizes delivering data quickly. And the metaverse will be a new iteration of the internet that supports a collection of real-time applications and experiences across devices.

More than METAverse

The metaverse is more meta than people think. The metaverse is going to be a collection of experiences across devices, time, and place, 2D and 3D, totally virtual or blended with real life. These experiences will be  enabled by new infrastructure that allows global instant real-time communications, new ways to manage presence and interactions (anonymous, pseudo anonymous, verified to be real, etc.), and new ways to earn money, pay for things, and secure assets of all kinds (for example, cryptocurrency tools that are always on, always connected).

The metaverse is not a place. The metaverse takes all the meta (your personality, the history of a place or thing, the feeling of something) surrounding us and allows it to be controlled and experienced in new interactive ways. A whole new universe of live real-time infrastructure and tooling is being built to minimize network issues like latency, and to allow us to finally interact with all the meta everyone and everything has.

“While the metaverse isn’t a fast-twitch AAA game, its social nature and desired importance means it will require low latency,” writes Matthew Ball, metaverse evangelist and managing partner of EpyllionCo. “Slight facial movements are incredibly important to human conversation — and we’re incredibly sensitive to slight mistakes and synchronization issues (hence the uncanny valley problem in CGI.) Social products, too, depend on their ubiquity… If we want to tap into foreign or at-distance labor in the virtual world, we need considerably more than just excess bandwidth.”

Accelerating the metaverse

Subspace moves meta fast enough that it can now be brought to life in real-time. CEO and founder Bayan Towfiq started Subspace in 2018; today, the company has 400 million users on its network. The company quickly helped gaming partners reduce lag, reach a larger audience, and increase security before realizing they’d effectively built a parallel internet that puts high-traffic applications on their own network, ensuring the fastest and most stable path for instant experiences.

“The metaverse is not possible with today’s internet,” says Towfiq. “Much like multiplayer online games are limited by current network conditions, the metaverse is only possible with private network capabilities delivered to any destination on the internet. With Subspace, virtual interactions can span continents, with minimal lag and with high availability.”

Shahin Farshchi, partner at Lux Capital and a member of Subspace’s board, sees the company at the forefront of the metaverse realization.

“We’re in a new phase today with real-time applications,” says  Farshchi. “And to go beyond that, to accomplish the metaverse, there needs to be availability of real-time applications through technologies and products such as Subspace. The world now requires a new kind of internet built for instant experience and connectivity.”

Accessing the metaverse

Today, Subspace released its dedicated real-time network built for the metaverse. By proffering their network-as-a-service, Subspace allows developers and creators to use the tools that some of the leading companies in the world are deploying for instant digital experiences, thus enabling consumers to interact with all the meta around them.

Says Towfiq: “For the past few years, our team at Subspace has built a network that is going to fundamentally change how multiplayer gaming is delivered. Publishers that care about their customers have to see this. It reduces lag, reaches a larger audience, and increases security. Now we are taking that global private network to a wider audience.”

Subspace has deployed a global private network, including a dedicated fiber optic backbone, patented internet weather mapping, and custom hardware in hundreds of cities. This network pulls gaming traffic off the internet close to users and ensures the fastest and most stable path. But Towfiq explains that the technology goes beyond a faster network.

“Subspace, for the first time, lets existing games and internet applications bring private networking to every internet-connected device without changes to code, VPN clients, or on-premise hardware.”

With Subspace NaaS, developers can build instant digital experiences and harness the meta, unencumbered by network constraints, customer-side hardware installation, or scalability limitations. Developers can access Subspace’s network through three on-ramps, available now:

• GlobalTURN offers global edge-to-edge acceleration for voice and video applications, without the expense and maintenance of multiple TURN servers.
• PacketAccelerator delivers latency improvements of up to 80% and reduces jitter and packet loss by 99% while minimizing DDoS, all with one simple connection.
• SIPTeleport enables superior voice quality for remote call center agents, while improving customer support experiences.

The metaverse is closer than you think

Subspace is already one of the top 10 IX-connected networks in the world, with plans to break the top five in the coming months.

Sam Teller, partner at Valor Equity Partners, says “Subspace is to the network as Akamai was to content delivery and Amazon was to compute. The massive number of real-time applications pushing non-cacheable content can now function for the first time at peak capacity, and the pace and economic efficiency with which Subspace has created one of the world’s largest networks is astounding, deploying internet POPs around the world at a cost 100 times less than today’s standard.”

Today’s Subspace NaaS release marks a major milestone in making real-time a reality and achieving the metaverse. And for the companies and developers who seek to be part of this multi-trillion dollar part of the world economy, Subspace is the place to start.

Learn more at www.subspace.com.

Nikki Shum-Harden is VP Marketing at Subspace. 

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