Despite the match taking place during the middle of the working day, people were able to live stream the match through services such as the BBC iPlayer, meaning they never had to leave their desks in order to catch all the action.
But while most of the UK switched over to iPlayer to watch the match, we were watching the match through the impact it had on our network.
Below are two graphs that should give you some idea of the rise in traffic the BE network during the game.
The first graph below shows you the network traffic over the course of the day:
The rise in traffic to the left shows the lift from the games the night before, as people got home from work and went online. But you can again see that uplift around 3pm, when the England game kicked off.
The second graph below indicates the rise in traffic during the England game itself:
As you can see, we experienced an incredible amount of increased traffic at an off-peak time during the England game, though we don't have an aggregated number of the percentage rise, as traffic varies by area.
Do we also spot a little jump at around 3:20pm, around the time when De Foe bagged the winner?
Not only did the nation's business grind to a halt, but it seems that many people's internet connections did also. We've had reports of dropped packets and congestion on other providers, as pointed out by a post from the BE Usergroup.
We're not fans of buffering at BE and we can only imagine the anguish of English fans during the match when their streams buffered whenever the ball got near the Slovenian net.
And dread to think how many people missed the winning goal due to buffering.
That's why we launched our Campaign to Banish Buffering, because we want people on other ISPs to experience an England win in the same way that BE members do - without buffering.
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6 comments:
The whole graph being green indicates that there was still plenty of bandwidth left, despite the spike in traffic? ;-)
BBC iPlayer had awful results buffering but it was more gittery than anything, if you where were prepared and got in line early, TVCatchup went unaffected.
Trying to watch Doctor Who in HD on Saturday night just as it hits iPlayer is also sometimes a pain - Is that BE's problem, or the BBC's?
Vertical scale or it means nothing :)
interesting. do you release stats by area? would be interested to see if some areas are more interested than others. actually, would be interested to see a regular night, when nothing important's on telly for comparison.
Wasnt the increase in traffic down to those in west london who lost electricity at around the time of the England goal?
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