Piers Daniell

Never before has the internet played such a key role in bringing public events to the masses. First it was the election, then football, Wimbledon, cricket and even the budget brought to the desktop of thousands of office workers previously unable to partake in such events during office hours. With the advent of BBC’s excellent IPlayer the events are only a click away from anyone’s desktop.

As a business specialising in bringing connectivity to corporate customers, rather than consumers, we get to see the difference between a standard day in the office and one with a major event. Most of you will be familiar with 9/11 when the internet literally ground to a halt in the UK as we watched America come under attack. Back then there was very little video streaming and websites would crash under the demand for information.

Today it is a different story, and while England playing football by no means compares to the interest generated back in 2001, it does put the internet under enormous strain. And today we have video streaming which soaks up bandwidth putting demand on connections. For us, ie Fluidata, the game was an interesting test of the network which normally runs well below capacity as we focus on selling low contention, high bandwidth services.

As you can see from the graph from the monitoring on one of our networks we do literally nothing on the weekend (as most businesses are closed) and little traffic during the evening. However as the game started at 3 pm today (end of the graph) you can see traffic nearly doubled as people closed down outlook and logged onto the BBC…

As a business internet service provider we generally see quiet evenings, high traffic loads during the day and pretty much no traffic over the weekends. Last week however was slightly different as the country woke up to a hung parliament and proceeded to spend the rest of the day following developments. As you can see from the graph traffic on the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th May was relatively normal, however on Friday traffic loads increased dramatically as people demanded to know what was going on.

We saw a higher use of BBC’s IPlayer which became more prevalent as the day wore on as employers obviously relaxed the use of it within local networks. On a more national level we did see bandwidth restrictions in some operator’s networks as their backbone peaked. Roll on the World Cup!

Virgin Media this week launched their 50 Mb/s home service. I have written here before on their offering and misuse of the term ‘fibre’ and will be interested to see exactly how this service fairs. Theoretically at this speed users should be able to download at 5 MB/s meaning a 700 MB video (such that you get on Sky or BBC Iplayer) should take no more than a few minutes.

However I don’t believe take up will be high for a number of reasons. Firstly it costs £50 per month which is too much for the vast majority of home users – kids who are going to want to use this kind of speed are going to have a hard job convincing their parents that £600 per year is well spent. Secondly even though we are a business only ISP are seeing more attempts by media owners to track down IP addresses from where they believe illegal downloads have taken place. It must be a complete nightmare on consumer networks so companies like Virgin are either going to have to put restrictions in place or media owners will make more effort to prosecute. Problem is that if you remove the ‘free’ aspect of videos and music then I believe a lot of the requirement for high downloads will reduce, not increase.

Until HD video is widely distributed through IP home users aren’t going to see much of a difference between 20 or 50 Mb/s. Be There for example have been selling ADSL2+ in the UK for the past few years and with their extended footprint on the back of Telefonica O2’s investment have I believe a kind of glass ceiling in how many users require their service. Their service and quality of network is better than Virgin, so if they are selling a vastly cheaper but not much slower connection then how is Virgin going to compete?

Another factor is the speed at which the websites operate at. We have had 20 + Mb/s in our office for a number of years now and I know that downloading video or music can take an age, even though I know there isn’t any problems with the network (as it is Fluidata’s!). So the line can support more than 2 MB/s but real world tests show only 300 KB/s is possible due to capacity issues with the website.

Something else that is in the small print is the measly 1.5 Mb/s upload (equates to 0.15 MB/s) which I think will be a bigger problem going forward. More people are now logging into their home from outside or getting their home to send data like video out to the internet using technology such as Slingbox. The speed Virgin is offering is ok for most current services buy why pay more for less than half the speed other carriers offer?

As I say, consumers watch this space.