World cup network traffic surges to all time high during England’s crunch group match with Slovenia Most companies had taken steps to protect vital network applications being affected by network hungry video streaming
LONDON, 23th June 2010 – Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses, has today released statistics showing that network traffic from its 3,500 business customers hit an all time record of double the normal network traffic during England’s crunch group match with Slovenia. The traffic for today’s final group match followed a pattern that has emerged since the tournament kicked off last Monday, showing a close correlation between network traffic and key matches. Before today’s England game the highest peak had occurred during the surprise German defeat by Serbia on Friday 18th June.
The increase in traffic is largely attributable to many employees watching the game on online sites like the BBC iPlayer, as a streamed football match on a single computer can consume around 750Mb. Another factor that boosted bandwidth consumption was extra traffic being generated around the match as employees shared the experience with friends, family and colleagues on social networking sites like Twitter. Whilst millions of workers enjoyed England’s football performance, Star’s data centre staff and customer service desk were hard at work ensuring that customers experienced no performance issues with any of their business critical applications during the high traffic levels experienced during the match.
According to John Adey, Star’s Chief Operating Officer; “We are pleased to say that our own provisions and prior planning meant that, in spite of the surge in demand on our infrastructure, we were able to maintain normal services to all our customers. Judging by the massive traffic we saw as the BBC iPlayer came on line just before 3 pm today, it is clear that employees were determined to watch England seal their bid to get into the knock out stage. Since we also had very few calls into our support line during the match, it seems that most companies had taken heed of the advice offered by Star and other experts ahead of the match to make provisions to ensure that critical network applications weren’t affected.”
He added, “We believe that we are seeing the same pattern in the workplace, which is potentially habit forming, and that we have seen before during other major sporting events, such as the 2008 Olympic Games. What we are seeing is that after each major event finishes, traffic after the event is higher than it was just before, indicating that workers become more prone to watching video content online whilst at work.”
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