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Engineer olympics

iPlayer demand forecast scheduled by session at the Olympics

Just sat in one of our ongoing planning sessions to calculate our bandwidth BBC estimates of iPlayer busy periods during London 2012 Olympics - click to enlargeneeds during the London 2012 Olympics. It’s a complicated call and we will be telling all nearer the time.

One of the data sources we are using is the BBC’s own estimates of iPlayer traffic growth. The inset photo shows when the BBC is expecting heavy iPlayer traffic loads and is based on the sport/competitor mix for any given session.

The colour coding scheme doesn’t tell us how much traffic is expected for each event but the Beeb is planning for a peak of 1Terabit per second.

The capacity planning and quality management  for the Olympics is not totally straightforward because there are factors involved outside the control of any individual ISP. Load on the iPlayer servers is one and the traffic at individual exchanges is another. As an industry we are going to have to be nimble to make sure that our customers’ experience is a good one.

More as I get it…

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

3 replies on “iPlayer demand forecast scheduled by session at the Olympics”

Who wants to bet BT are doing the absolute minimum in terms of upgrades and that while ISPs will have upgraded their core, peering and BT links to cope the BT backhaul network will again be swamped?

I think its near to a dead cert.

pctech: “… the BT backhaul network will again be swamped”

Er, really? Any evidence for your assertion, or are you just trusting the word of ISPs who are wont to blame big bad BT when things are slow?

Actually Ethel/pctech since I wrote that post I have been impressed with BT – check this post out http://www.trefor.net/2012/04/23/its-nice-when-someone-impresses-when-you-are-not-expecting-it-bt-wholesale/

It is difficult to see where the real problem lies when you can’t see all the network but BT has impressed me with their exchange capacity policy and we will just have to see how everyone gets on in August when the Olympics are on.

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