Internet traffic is up significantly this morning as bleary eyed election-watchers come into the office and pick up where they left off last night.
Noon-time traffic on Timico’s ADSL network is up approx 25% on the same time yesterday. This percentage seems to be reasonably constant for all major online events. Similar burst have been seen in the past for the Olympics, the Ashes Cricket, US President Obama’s inauguration and the last budget speech. Video streaming almost exclusively acocunts for the increase today.
This does suggest that there is a community of people in the work place that regularly accesses online video for the big events. One wonders whether this is with the knowledge and consent of their employers. Most of Timico’s customers are businesses. I doubt that they have TVs in the office so this may be to a certain extent a B2B ISP issue.
2 hours later – traffic growth is now up by 33%. In my experience this is a record for an event.
5 replies on “Workers All Watching the Election Shennanigans Online from Offices”
interesting…
Might be related to the BBC starting the video stream automatically when you visit their homepage. Possibly a test for the World Cup
very much a test for the world cup James.
The other interesting thought here for me is if business’ have made suitable licensing arrangements for TV broadcasts to be viewed within their offices etc.
iirc, you need a TV license to watch anything on a PC that is being broadcast at the same time, and with the World Cup coming up, I wonder if there will be any attempted crack down on this…
can’t see it happening – the logistics of trying to do it make it totally impractical. it’s somethng of even greater scale than the P2P unlawful breach of copyright debate (ie music downloading)