Broadband News
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Collapse of UK Internet Greatly Exaggerated
11 Oct 2009 | 10.54 Europe/London
The online streaming of last night's World Cup football match appeared to pass without incident, despite the predictions of doom.
We will find out later today whether this is due to lack of viewers or because appropriate measures were taken to provide sufficient capacity.
Personally I ran three PCs streaming the match (from one £4.95 subscription !) and the 1 Mbit/s "high quality" stream was pretty robust. The traffic via one ISP (Demon) went direct to a content server in Frankfurt with 7 hops and a good ping time, bypassing LINX or other potential bottlenecks.
Update: The firms described the number of viewers as "close to half a million" but this includes figures for the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), which screened the game free for troops, as well as those who watched it in cinemas and online. Others have estimated the internet subscriptions at 250-300,000.
Finally, it is worth noting that for many the broadcast was effectively not on the public internet at all, but used the content delivery network of Limelight Networks to supply direct to ISPs.
We will find out later today whether this is due to lack of viewers or because appropriate measures were taken to provide sufficient capacity.
Personally I ran three PCs streaming the match (from one £4.95 subscription !) and the 1 Mbit/s "high quality" stream was pretty robust. The traffic via one ISP (Demon) went direct to a content server in Frankfurt with 7 hops and a good ping time, bypassing LINX or other potential bottlenecks.
Update: The firms described the number of viewers as "close to half a million" but this includes figures for the British Forces Broadcasting Service (BFBS), which screened the game free for troops, as well as those who watched it in cinemas and online. Others have estimated the internet subscriptions at 250-300,000.
Finally, it is worth noting that for many the broadcast was effectively not on the public internet at all, but used the content delivery network of Limelight Networks to supply direct to ISPs.
have heard reports that people are experiencing faster connections this morning too. Wonder if some plugs were pulled to undo bottlenecks? Shows what can be done when openreach make their minds up to provide a service instead of throttling everyone. Look forward to hearing more detail. What sort of feed do you have? We can't stream anything at all here, not even youtube, so nobody in our area bothered to try to subscribe to the match.
11 Oct 2009 | 11.05 Europe/London
Nothing at all to do with Openreach, nobody changed the local loop overnight.
11 Oct 2009 | 13.15 Europe/London
More likely that ISPs paid closer attention to DPI policy this weekend :)
12 Oct 2009 | 12.47 Europe/London