The ISP industry woke up yesterday morning to a spike on their collective networks. I had people down to my office asking whether the World Cup had started a new trend in online TV watching. It undoubtedly reinforces the trend but this time the bandwidth rush was due to a Microsoft Update and not the football.
The football is starting to have an effect though – viewing figures during the opening ceremony were up around 30% over normal video watching. This didn’t have any ill effects on the quality of the experience at least at my end.
30 minutes into the opening game between the Hosts South Africa the score remains nil nil and the video traffic has grown by about 60% above the norm. This is not as many people as were watching the shennanigans the day after the general election (although it almost is). But this is not England playing here…
Just to remind readers the concern is that online viewing is going to flood the internet and affect regular users. Warnings have been issued by many ISPs and content providers. Looks like our pipes are ok at the moment although as predicted we have hit a record high in terms of bandwidth usage. If you are making a VoIP call or sending email etc you should still be fine.
You do wonder at Microsoft’s timing though, releasing an update just before the biggest demand event the internet will have seen to date. I guess there are geeks everywhere. Football? What’s football?
{ 3 comments }
It will be interesting to keep an eye on this throughout the world cup, as the demands will be far greater during the olympics. Forewarned is forearmed as me gran used to say…
@cyberdoyle – the (dis)advantage of the world cup is that its discrete 90 minute slots as opposed to 8-10 hours of continual background with spikes at (random) points.
People seem to have forgotten that its Wimbledon at the same time and there are several England/Australia cricket matches could be fun if things get interesting in all three at the same time…
Oh and the F1 is on this weekend too
.
Comments on this entry are closed.