Soccer dip
An interesting traffic pattern on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange during the live webcast of the year: the World Soccer game between NL and DK. Instead of a traffic spike, overall traffic was lower. A dip! (updated chart)
The AMS-IX normally has a 750-850Gbps traffic load, making it one of the largest internet exchanges in the world. The live webcast was expected to add 100-120Gbps on top of that. It was expected that the internet providers networks would fill up, especially because the game was scheduled on Monday 1:30PM: office time.
In order to downscale the impact, the live stream was offloaded via the KPN CDN because over 40% of business and consumer broadband subscription lines are powered by KPN ISP’s. The KPN CDN offloaded 47Gbps of the live stream traffic from the AMS-IX. The public broadcaster limited the capacity to 120Gbps in total. 120Gbps is really a great achievement and a record, my compliments for that to the NPO!
(For US readers: remember, this is for a country with 16 million citizens. If you want to compare this volume to the size of the USA, multiply by 15, that would be 1,8Tbps).
The public broadcaster also issued some press releases to help people understand that there could be bottlenecks and advised to use other media like Cable TV and DVB-T. These infrastructures are better suited for mass-scale distribution.
The most interesting trend was the actual internet usage. I anticipated some lower average traffic usage, but hadn’t expected it to be that much lower. It was like no one was actually online, except for the live stream viewers. The AMS-IX does 750Gbps-850Gbps: it was down to ±600Gbps (without the live soccer stream). Note that the AMS-IX carries a lot of European traffic, so the difference is mainly Dutch traffic. Even with the added 50-75Gbps of the live streams, traffic load was lower than on a normal working day.
What happened? Well, almost everyone was at home, watching TV. We hardly had any traffic jams today. Business buildings are virtually empty. We didn’t have a single support call from the Netherlands. People called in sick or took a day off to see the football match. The entire country stopped working. No work = no internet usage. Being at home behind the TV screen = no YouTube. I bet YouTube saw a many-Gbps drop in their traffic. We see a dip on Dutch StreamZilla CDN usage as well. Interesting.
Does this mean that the Internet is a great distribution infrastructure for broadcasts? Not yet. We need multicasting. We need scaling. We need more offloading. We don’t want lo-res streams, we want HD! We don’t want to stop at 120K viewers, we want 100 times more: 12M viewers!
Does the traffic dip mean that the internet has all the capacity for large live events? No. Not every event has the impact to stop a country. Tennis doesn’t. Olympics don’t. Other soccer games don’t. Disasters don’t. Pop festivals don’t. Many events won’t eat bandwidth of other services and will generate large spikes. The ISP’s were lucky this time…
AMSIX pattern (note: this is an indicative image, not actual measured traffic)
Oh and the game? Well the Dutch won 2-0. But it wasn’t an exciting game…
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