Culmen Cache Steering Engine

Send game, video and update downloads to your upstream's cache nodes, run them at unlimited speed, and keep them out of your subscribers' quota — automatically, for every plan.

What it does

• Three traffic classes — cached and exempt; unlimited but counted, for paid streaming you choose to count; and normal. Each gets its own queue and quota treatment
• Recognition in three layers — DNS names, TLS hostnames learned from live connections, and fixed provider prefixes, so devices on private DNS and launchers that resolve on their own are still caught
• Cache-node routing — traffic is steered by where the cache actually is, not by service name, so an uncached CDN host is never dragged onto a line it does not belong on
• Unlimited speed through one static queue above every subscriber queue, so plan limits and fair-use throttles never touch cached traffic
• Quota credit — with the RADIUS & Quota Engine, cached bytes are credited back daily and monthly, from the same meter the quota is enforced on
• Second-carrier fallback — if the carrier whose caches you use goes down, lookups move to another carrier's caches, and only what that carrier really caches stays exempt
• Ships with recognition for Steam, Riot, Battle.net, Epic, EA, PlayStation, Xbox, Ubisoft, Roblox, Windows and Apple updates, TikTok and Disney+

Why it pays for itself

A game update is tens of gigabytes. Served from the open internet it burns your paid upstream quota and your subscriber's allowance at once; served from a cache node inside your upstream it costs neither, and arrives several times faster. On the network it was built for, one subscriber pulled Steam at 380 Mbps and had 38 GB credited back as cache in a single day.

The traps it already handles

DNS answers that expire mid-download and drop the traffic back into the customer's queue. Hostname patterns that swallow unrelated services because they were never anchored. A resolver cache that fills up and silently stops feeding the lists. Subscriber profiles that hand out a public resolver, which disables the whole cache path with no error anywhere. Each of these cost a day to find.

Needs an upstream with cache nodes — LanCache, Akamai or Google GGC are the usual ones. Pairs with the RADIUS & Quota Engine for the quota credit.