Connect the City – a tycoon game where you build your own ISP
Connect the City is a tycoon game for PC in which you run your own internet provider. You start in a garage with one rented line and a town that wants to get online. Street by street you lay cables, set up cabinets and connect homes and businesses – until your network reaches seven places across a region.
Coming soon to Steam
Real network technology, simple controls
Copper gets slower with every meter. Coax shares its bandwidth with the neighbours. Fiber has no length problem, but it costs. Cabinets with a DSLAM, a CMTS or an OLT bring the speed back into the neighbourhood, a second copper pair can be bonded for more, and in the evening you see whether your internet line carries the peak. Every window tells you in one sentence what is going on; behind "More details" you find attenuation, rates, pairs and load.
Build in the city: trenches, ducts and crews
You plan a route, a civil works crew digs it. The cable runs from the drum into the trench and grows behind the crew, traffic drives around the site, and the road gets a narrow patch afterwards. Laying a cable beside the road is cheap, under the asphalt it is expensive, and where a duct already lies it costs almost nothing. One switch hides the town and shows your network underground.
From a garage to a data center
Your site grows in four steps across the yard: garage, equipment room, technical building, data center. Your internet line from the carrier grows in steps up to 1.2 Tbit, fiber feeders get transceivers from 10 to 400 Gbit. You set your own plans and prices, offer customers an upgrade, hire technicians and customer service, and later give businesses a fiber line of their own.
Mobile network, wireless and microwave links
Licences come in order: 3G, then LTE, then 5G. You put up sites with antennas and bring them into service. Homes without a cable can get internet over your mobile network through a router with a SIM – until the cell fills up in the evening and it is time to lay a cable. A microwave link connects a site without digging, if there is line of sight over the rooftops: up to 10 km, from 1 Gbit down to 300 Mbit depending on the distance.
A region of seven places
Around your home town lie villages, an industrial town, a university town, and a harbour town and a seaside resort on the coast, linked by country roads. Each place has its own character: the resort is full in summer, the university is quiet in the holidays. A fiber cable from site to site becomes a backbone; with a second route a site survives a cut. A site out in the country can lose power in a storm – unless you give it a generator.
Faults, technicians and handwork
A digger cuts a cable, a fan fails in a cabinet, a home connection drops out, a storm hits a site. You send a technician – or do the job yourself on a board drawn like the real device: punch down a pair on a terminal block, find a cable fault with a TDR and splice it, swap a transceiver, align a microwave dish. Every board is an offer, never a must: a technician can always do it instead.
A calm interface
The town is the screen. A few panels of dark glass, one main action per window, large quiet text. Numbers have a fixed place and change at most about once a second, nothing jumps or flickers. Everything you need to decide is in the simple view; the measurements wait behind "More details".
German and English
The whole game is in English and German. You can switch the language in the settings at any time; numbers and dates follow the language.
Status
Connect the City is in development. It is already playable from the first cable to a network across the region. An Early Access release on Steam is planned. There is no date and no price yet.
Coming soon to Steam
FAQ
Is there a game where you build your own internet provider?
Yes – that is what Connect the City is about. You start an internet provider (ISP) in a garage, lay copper, coax and fiber through a town, set up cabinets, build a mobile network and connect a whole region. It is a tycoon game: you build, set prices and keep the network running.
When does Connect the City come out?
There is no release date yet. An Early Access release on Steam is planned; the date will be announced here and on the Steam page. There is no price yet either.
Which platforms will it be on?
The first release is planned for Windows PC via Steam. Other platforms have not been decided.
Is Connect the City multiplayer?
No. Connect the City is a single-player game.
Which languages does the game support?
English and German, both complete. You can switch between them in the settings at any time.
Do I need to know about networks to play?
No. Every window says in plain words what is happening and what a button does and costs. A guided start takes you to your first customer. The technical values – attenuation, rates, pairs, latency – are there behind "More details" for anyone who wants them.
How realistic is the network technology?
The content is close to the real thing, the controls are simplified. Copper loses speed with distance, coax is shared, fiber has its own costs; DSLAM, CMTS and OLT sit in the cabinets; the internet line from the carrier comes in steps; a full mobile cell gets slower for everyone. Distances, times and costs are scaled so that the game stays playable.
Can you go bankrupt?
Yes, if the money runs out for too long. There are four difficulty levels; on "Free build" you cannot go bankrupt. After you have won, you can keep playing with further goals.