Star readies extra network capacity in anticipation of expected surge in demand for England’s match against Slovenia
LONDON, 15th June 2010 – Star, the provider of on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses, has today released statistics of internet traffic flowing through its UK-based data centres. The early group matches indicate that the FIFA 2010 World Cup is likely to generate the highest online traffic in the UK of any event to date. The graph below shows that network traffic during the South Africa versus Mexico opening match and yesterday’s Holland versus Denmark and Japan versus Cameroon matches showed network traffic up by 18 % on normal traffic patterns.
Star, who focus exclusively on the UK business market place, has put in place contingency plans in the run up to the World Cup to be able to add significant extra bandwidth for customers should it be demanded. Having past experience helps as well as being able to analyse data from the internet traffic spikes experienced during the Olympic Games in 2008 and the recent election results, both of which generated a substantial network surge in demand.
According to John Adey, Chief Operating Officer for Star, “By using advanced monitoring technologies we are able to pin point the link between network spikes and sporting and political events, to the degree where we can directly correlate network surges when British athletes like swimmer Rebecca Adlington and cyclist Chris Hoy were competing. The peaks of traffic for these gold medal contests were more than 30% above the norm.”
He added, “A more recent event that saw a network spike of 22% occurred the day after the Election, when workers were watching as the electoral results from around the country were rolling in. We believe that the World Cup will be an even more important online event, with an anticipated 5 million adults watching the event online - 2.6 million of them whilst at work . We anticipate a significant network spike on the 23rd June when England play Slovenia at 15.00hrs. The majority of us will no doubt be at work, and this also coincides with the second round of Andy Murray’s quest to win the Wimbledon crown.”
Many of Star’s business customers have contacted their customer service help line seeking advice on how to ensure that iPlayer traffic doesn’t take priority over other business critical applications. For managed network customers Star is able to prioritise bandwidth with QoS (Quality of Service) for important business functions such as voice or business critical applications like SAP running on the web. For UK businesses without the ability to prioritise traffic in this way Star advises Web Filtering as a means to control online content by type or time of the day and avoid potential disruption.
Star will be publishing statistics of network traffic showing demand peaks after all of the major tournament matches. These will be available at www.star.co.uk/worldcup