This is the LONAP graph...
As you can see, it was a couple of hours of very high usage.
A&A customers were no different, and our network saw proportionately similar burst of traffic. The good news is that the recent upgrades have proved their worth and it looks like we managed very well. The stats we publish with show that some links were pushed to the point of some errored seconds (even one packet dropped in a second counts as an errored second) but not enough to cause damping of any lines, or any packet loss of latency peaks showing on our line graphs.
It would appear that some other ISPs did not fair as well. We would not have coped before our recent network upgrades. This has been a good test, and well done to the team at A&A for all their hard work this year making it happen.
Interesting that LONAP shows quite a considerable peak, but LINX doesn't (even though the BBC is peereable at both)
ReplyDeleteWe noticed about a 20% drop in telephone calls across our system around the same time so I think some people were watching it at work and avoiding distractions.
ReplyDeleteIt's things like this that make me sad multicast never really took off. Even if the BBC were to just set up a private multicast to their peers that they presented on iPlayer whenever someone from those networks connected you could present 4K TV to thousands of hosts so easily.
ReplyDeleteOoo I just found this: https://support.bbc.co.uk/multicast/peering/
ReplyDeleteThe problem isn't that the BBC don't support it (they do, as you have seen), but that most domestic ISPs don't. This (I suspect) is mainly because the standard model of broadband delivery in UK - ie lots of PPPoA/E sessions over xDSL medium does little to make multicast a more efficient delivery mechanism *for the ISP* than regular unicast would.
ReplyDeleteThat said I believe BT/Openreach offer multicast as an option on their wholesale services (used for BT TV I believe) but I believe this is chargeable extra, charged per stream (possibly even per stream, per exchange) to the service provider.
Yes, the BT option is complicated. In these rare cases multicast would be helpful but the bulk of usage increases seen by ISPs are unicast streamed media I believe, and things like local netflix caching at ISP does the best you can for that. Apart from sporting events I can see simultaneous viewing (and hence use of multicast) dying out.
DeleteDo A&A support multicast, or have any plans to do so? And if not, why not?
DeleteSame reason as mentioned above. Apart from the fact that most of the bandwidth growth is unicast, we can't easily multicast out to customers with the normal L2TP type connections to customers.
DeleteIt saddens me that so many people watched this at all, I don't understand why football is so much more appealing to most people than other sports or pastimes. Do I get to bum off work to do something else for two hours? No apparently, you can only bum off to watch football (official policy, I asked).
ReplyDeleteBut it also saddens me that so many people watched this live over the internet. Broadcast TV whether by satellite or Freeview does a much better job, not tying up network bandwidth and delivering better picture and sound quality as well (because internet TV always skimps on the bit rate). Internet TV is great for catchup (but even here I record live TV on a PVR by preference), but live? For most people why?
For me it would be because I don't have a TV aerial near the TV these days. (But then again I don't have a TV license so don't watch live.)
DeleteOut of interest did you see any impact on any of your TTB services due to issues in the TTB backhaul network? We were seeing impact on TTB EFM and GEA ethernet services and the service provider were blaming it on congestion on the TTB backhaul network which clearly isn't good enough if that is the case for ethernet services which are meant to be uncontended - and on the GEA's we were at <16mbit so in the OR GEA guarenteed. I am not convinced is wasn't an issue with their handover from TTB.
ReplyDeleteTTB congestion is pretty rare and usually some misconfiguration. We have not seen cases of general TTB congestion due to lack of capacity as far as I am aware.
DeleteHmm... me thinks you need to sell your consultancy services to another ISP in close proximity to you then to get their systems setup and explain how to specify enough capacity in their network and handovers :-(
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