Been a while since I posted one of these blogs, so looking at the graphs for the past two weeks I thought I’d post a couple of observations of the traffic we’ve been seeing.
Below is the graph of iPlayer traffic from Wednesday to Sunday last week:
Circled are three points of interest that we’ve noticed. The first is Thursday night, a massive 973,73Mbps spike of iPlayer traffic; a record high for iPlayer on our network and probably represents somewhere in the region of 2,000 of our customers watching iPlayer simultaneously.
Like May last year with football on ITV while The Apprentice was on, last week we saw people turning to iPlayer to catch up on The Apprentice the following evening and watching the football on Wednesday. Only this year the spike was 50% higher as presumably more and more people are using the Internet to catch up on TV they miss.
The second and third circled points are Saturday and Sunday morning; people watching the Malaysian Grand Prix online. The qualifying session on Saturday and the race on Sunday. This one is a bit of a change from what we’ve seen in the past. Previously, live sporting events tend to have only caused noticeable spikes in traffic when they’ve been shown on a weekday during working hours; people watching online at work because there’s no TV handy. But these spike are at a weekend. Maybe this is still people at work, or people staying in bed and watching on the laptop. We’ll have to keep a look out when the Grand Prixs move to Europe and see if we see lunchtime spikes.
Coming up we’re expecting to see plenty of traffic after the new Doctor Who on Saturday evening and Robin Hood seems to have upped the volume of iPlayer on a Sunday.
Dave Tomlinson
Plusnet Network Transformation
This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Friday, April 10th, 2009 at 1:08 pm and is tagged with iPlayer, Traffic Management and is posted in the category Traffic Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
What's the plan longterm for this? Will you be able to handle another three to fourfold increase in video bitrate when everyone starts moving over to HD? iPlayer is meant to be starting rolling it out very soon and facebook and youtube both now have HD functionality.
Pedant Alert : The plural of Grand Prix is "Grands Prix", not Grand Prixs. Sorry, I just couldn't help myself.
Agreeing with the general comment by Karl in that there is going to be a very considerable increase in TV prog' watching, in downloading films/music and other large files created by business users, I rather resent the drop in Broadband speed caused in the most part by TV media exploiting a facility to which they make no contribution. Recognising that the B'B' facility is limited with bandwidth sharing in your street, it surely beholds these major media providers to come over with some support for a country wide installation of fibre optics. This in turn would benefit all users.
(Errors and Omissions Accepted in case in I couldn't help myself !)
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