A lot of the country has been subject to an awful lot of rain in the past few days. Sheffield and Rotherham have been particularly badly hit as can be seen on the the BBC, the PlusNet Community Site and the Sheffield Forum. This post from Carol goes into some of the detail of how we've been coping at PlusNet. Events like this will mean that we put our "High demand" and "Disaster situation" broadband platform configurations on standby. Under normal operations the rate limits in place would be as per the following pages, BBYW, Premier and Broadband Plus. At times of lower than expect network load we will increase some of the rate limits to maximise network usage but at times of significantly higher than normal usage we may need to take further action as per this page. In particular we have been looking at the effect the weather has on VPN and HTTP traffic. During the winter snow we saw significant increases in VPN traffic as people decided to work from home rather than brave the weather. We needed to ensure close monitoring of the traffic in case there were similar patterns and if so consider switching to high demand operation. Our high demand configuration would mean reducing the rate limits on P2P and Usenet traffic, and possibly FTP and HTTP downloads, the exact amount would be determined by how much the overall traffic increased. The aim being to ensure that the interactive traffic that people were using still work as it should. We can also fine-tune the high demand configuration dependent on customer feedback. We would anticipate that a weekday during the daytime that customers would want VPN, browsing, VoIP and email in particular prioritised under high demand at the expense of P2P and binary Usenet. Whereas in an evening gaming may take the place of VPN. Do people agree on this? If something has to be restricted in order to cope with the increased demand what would you choose and in what order? The disaster situation configuration on the other hand would normally only need to be brought in should there be a significant loss of central pipe capacity. In this case in order to ensure a fair share of the available bandwidth we may need to temporarily block certain traffic like P2P and binary Usenet and introduce a per user rate limit on other traffic. Whilst we are ready at any time to activate the high demand or disaster situation configurations if needed we hope that they aren't necessary but want to ensure that any change over is a painless as possible by preparing for the conditions at hand and removed as soon as it is no longer required. And in case anyone is wondered who is monitoring, well it’s the Comms Cat of course ☺ 
When disaster strikes