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!