CDN Strategy Blog

Yesterday I pitched logistics to the ±200 people audience of Online Tuesday in Amsterdam, in less than 5 minutes.

I used crowdsourcing to demonstrate the limited capacity of mobile networks. I wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to disrupt a mobile network. It -uhm- worked. Sorry! :) The 5 min video is available below.

Here’s what happened:

I tested the 3G download speed before my pitch. It varied between 1.5 and 2.5Mbps which is pretty ok for a crowded urban area like downtown Amsterdam, especially in a room full of social media addicts. I’m on KPN btw, their 3G speed in rural areas like where I live can be as good as >5Mbps.

I asked the audience: who has a smartphone? Almost everyone of course. I said that we were about to enter an experiment to take down some mobile networks and experience the same problems that Steve Jobs had the day before on his WWDC keynote. The audience liked that :)

I asked them to switch off WiFi and then launch their YouTube app, and start the most popular video. About 15 people in the audience did this simultaneously.

My speedtest bandwidth indicator immediately dropped to ±150Kbps. T-Mobile traffic went down to almost zero. (I think this is because of the larger share of iPhones on the T-Mobile network).

No internet, no twitter, no email, no surfing in the entire area. And if there was a connection, it was slow. Actually the chance was pretty big that phone calls would drop as well, even 112 (911).

I then asked what would happen if everyone in the country would drive to Amsterdam to get their newspaper in the morning. Yeah, that would be a huge mess. So I asked why we do we still do this on the web? If we have logistics on our roads, we should do this on the web too… It was a fun pitch.

Master your Dutch and enjoy in Flash video, Silverlight or on your iPhone.