Under the terms of the agreement, Level 3 is delivering origin storage, caching and download services to provide potentially hundreds of gigabytes per second (Gbps) of on-demand capacity for game patch updates. Funcom's developers regularly update the Age of Conan as the game evolves. These updates are delivered with software patches to the online game via Level 3's CDN and need to be delivered smoothly to not interrupt the participation in the game by hundreds of thousands of players. During the first 60 days of the Age of Conan launch, the Level 3 CDN delivered over 2 petabytes (the equivalent of over 1 million high-quality online movies) of game patch updates to the Age of Conan players.

"We are pleased to collaborate with Funcom to deliver the scalable, high- quality services that the growing online gaming community requires," said Grant van Rooyen, president of Level 3's Content Markets Group. "The rich graphic and video environments Funcom delivers require very large amounts of bandwidth, and Level 3's global network and robust content delivery services are specifically designed to serve the needs of companies that require quality and dependability in the delivery of large-file content."

Level 3's content delivery network is designed to accommodate rich media content for large online audiences. Its CDN improves the speed and efficiency with which large-file, high-volume content traffic is delivered. The speed, quality and reliability that are delivered with these services are keys to providing the real-time user experience demanded by online gamers today.