Guest blog: We coped with the World Cup and the Budget, now bring on the London Olympics 2012

Guest blogger Trefor Davies is co-founder and chief technology officer of communications provider Timico. Check out his own blog, over at Trefor.net, for opinion on everything broadband related.

The World Cup continues despite England’s early exit. The build up to this football tournament has been a long one and not just from the footballing perspective. The ISP industry was looking at it beforehand with a degree of nervousness, simply because it represented an unknown quantity in terms of bandwidth usage over their networks.

To put things into perspective, large sporting events have increasingly attracted an online following. This began with the Beijing Olympics, followed by the Ashes Test series and the Open Golf and interspersed with some high profile political events such as the Inauguration of President Obama and the UK budget speech.

These events generated a surge of around 23 per cent in internet bandwidth usage over and above the normal state of affairs. That said, this normal state of affairs is in itself subject to a continual growth in traffic due to changing patterns of internet usage. The rule of thumb is that usage grows organically by 50 per cent per year.

There was a concern that the World Cup traffic would hugely eclipse the surge of previous years. Timico is a B2B ISP, so most of our traffic is during the day, unlike consumer ISPs who see their peak times from mid-afternoon until around midnight. The problem for B2B ISPs is that people don’t typically have a TV in the office, so if they want to watch a programme during the day they tend to do it online.

The early daytime matches saw an increase of about 70 per cent in video streaming, to 170 per cent of normal. This was not too bad – video represents somewhere between a quarter and a third of normal traffic. This percentage might come as a surprise to some, but if you consider that just clicking on a BBC web page (for example) often results in a video stream emanating from a box on the page, then it is simple really.

The budget took everyone by surprise, with a 309 per cent increase in the number of streams. However, the overall effect on bandwidth usage was not too great. MPs are quite a static bunch and hot air doesn’t use as much bandwidth as someone running around a football pitch.

Funnily enough the day before the budget there was a big spike at 9am that had us all rushing to the screens to try and figure out what was happening. Had someone kicked off early? It turned out to be a Microsoft Update. That’s OK.

The biggest surge was during the afternoon of the England v Slovenia match, where we saw a 357 per cent increase in streams – content delivery network Akamai reported the UK represented 22 per cent of their global traffic.

The latter rounds don’t worry us so much, because they are mostly in the evenings and England is out of the competition anyway. We did see a Murray flurry on Friday when he played Rafael Nadal in the Wimbledon Men’s Semi Finals, but since then it has all settled back to a semblance of normality. Phew.

As an industry we seemed to have coped quite well with the experience, though not without some hard work from network engineering teams.

Although the World Cup has been the internet’s largest event to date, we must consider this as merely a shot across the bows. The average streaming video was around 1Mb. Give it three years or so for FTTC to gain market penetration and everyone will be streaming HD to their PCs – and at a hefty 20Mb, that is going to cause havoc to an ISP's business model.

The London 2012 Olympics has the potential to put the football in the shade, at least in the UK. There is going to be even more media hype surrounding the event (if such a thing is possible), it is all going to be happening during the day and Team GB will have many potential Gold Medal winners to keep us hooked to the iPlayer.

My forecast is that the Akamai stats of the Olympics will eclipse those of the World Cup and that bandwidth records, as well as those of the Olympic sort, will be broken yet again. You do have to ask why is it that we can win Gold medals at the Olympics, but not on the football pitch? Perhaps we should steer away from that subject.

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