The internet connection for The Reality 2025 will be set up by our network team together with our partners Duocast and EventInfra. Both are an important link. From the event, Duocast will establish a connection to Nikhef Amsterdam, where EventInfra will take over and arrange the actual connection to the internet.

This year we have entered into a partnership with Duocast, a local IT service provider from Groningen. In recent months, Duocast has launched a new service, Duocast Connect+. This makes it possible to do network transport to Amsterdam via fiber optics.

For the more technical visitors, this service is based on DWDM. This is a fiber optic technology that allows very high speeds to be achieved by using multiple colors of light on one fiber. At the moment, the Duocast connection between Groningen and Amsterdam offers 800 gigabits per second of bandwidth, and they can expand this to 32 terabits per second in the future.

For The Reality 2025, Duocast will realize a 10 gigabit per second connection to Nikhef in Amsterdam for our event. This connection will be fully redundant and will run over two different routes from Groningen to Amsterdam. In addition to redundancy, the Duocast Connect+ solution offers a very low and stable latency over the connection. This is of great importance for playing games.

Once in Amsterdam, Duocast delivers this connection to EventInfra. In this setup, Duocast provides the transport between Groningen and Amsterdam. The Reality has been working with EventInfra for many years, they are a non-profit organization that provides internet access for non-profit events such as The Reality. EventInfra has a large stock of public IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, with which we can directly connect our event to the internet.

EventInfra has its own router in Nikhef Amsterdam and connects to various parties there to enable the most optimal route to destinations on the internet. Among other connections, they have a direct connection to the data center in which various large game publishers host their servers. And even if this direct connection fails, everything remains accessible via another connection.