Recently, large sporting events, such as the Beijing Olympics and the Open Golf, have increasingly attracted an online following. There was a concern that the World Cup and Wimbledon traffic this year would hugely eclipse the surge of previous years.
However as Timico is a business-only ISP and most of its traffic is carried during the day, unlike consumer ISPs who see their peak times from mid afternoon until around midnight, the company was well prepared to handle the increased use of online streaming.
“The early daytime matches saw an increase of about 70% in video streaming to 170% of normal. The biggest surge was during the afternoon of the England v Slovenia match on 23 June where we saw a 357% increase in streaming, with global content delivery network Akamai reporting that the UK represented 22% of their global traffic.
“Even with such high demands on bandwidth, Timico’s business to business traffic stayed at 100%, our customers commented that their video streaming was excellent, plus we saw 12% more data carried on our network through this extremely ‘internet busy’ period. Overall we seemed to have coped extremely well with the experience, though not without some hard work from our highly skilled network operations team,” said Trefor Davies, CTO at Timico.
“The London 2012 Olympics has the potential to put the World Cup in the shade, at least in the UK,” added Davies. “There is going to be even more media hype surrounding the event and it is all going to be happening during the day, meaning more people will be going online to watch and keep track of Team GB’s progress.
“To meet the ever growing requirements of bandwidth-hungry applications, Timico is always focused on, and investing in, delivering a high quality network that is reliable, resilient and built to cope with high demand. Businesses will always receive the best data speeds their line can achieve without being constrained by the limitations of Timico’s network,” concluded Davies.