Analysis of the BT wholesale network – which supports many UK ISPs – by BT Operate found that traffic reached its highest ever volume on the night of October 12th, following the release of an iOS5 update.
October 13th also saw massive data usage, with the BT network recording its second highest ever amount of data usage, less than 10Gbps lower than the previous evening and sustained over a longer period. Apple, meanwhile, has said that traffic volumes on its content delivery network were almost double the typical peak level on October 12th.
BT Operate said that the surges in data consumption exceeded previous highs set during the Wimbledon Championships and major England football matches with more than 80Gbps of extra traffic on its broadband network on the Wednesday, around twice the volume of the previous largest event – a FIFA World Cup match involving England.
John Petter, managing director of BT Retail, said: "We've seen the highest ever traffic levels over BT Retail's broadband network in the UK, with unprecedented demand for Apple's new iPhone operating system.”
"I'm happy to say the network coped fantastically well, with negligible congestion for broadband users. Our network team were even able to make some tweaks on Wednesday night which helped people to access their content even more smoothly", he added.
According to the Think Broadband newswire, the situation with the UK's broadband network may not have been as rosy as BT has claimed, as the story across other providers “appears to have been a week of an increase of complaints about rising latency and slower traffic.”
“The National Grid attempts to anticipate the level of demand at peak times, and broadband providers are in a similar position, but it seems past models of behaviour keep being broken. Cloud based computing and automatic updates to popular operating systems, if quietly slipped out the door, risk causing chaos, particularly if a situation arises where two competing devices release large updates at the same time”, noted the communications newswire.
“Perhaps one good thing is that the UK broadband network did not go into meltdown, and showed a reasonable ability to cope with big spikes in demand which may become more common in 2012 with the Olympics”, it said.
Think Broadband goes on to say that the load on fixed line broadband during 2012 is likely to be video from live events, whereas for mobile services, it will be the constant updates to social networking sites, and the growing use of Eye-Fi devices to upload photos from digital cameras as they are taken to online photo sites.