iOS 7 downloads consumed 20 percent of an ISP’s traffic on release day

[CyberAbc 290]

 

 

When Apple released iOS 7 to the world at 1pm ET on Sept. 18, legions of iPhone and iPad owners immediately downloaded the new operating system. That's no surprise, but statistics released today illustrate just how much of an impact the mobile OS had on Internet traffic.

At one unnamed North American fixed Internet provider, "Apple Updates immediately became almost 20 percent of total network traffic and continued to stay above 15 percent of total traffic into the evening peak hours," according to Sandvine's Global Internet Phenomena Report for the second half of 2013. Sandvine makes equipment that helps consumer broadband providers manage network congestion.

Over-the-air update sizes were 760MB for the iPhone 5, 900MB for the iPad 2, and 729MB for the Apple TV, the report says. Updates downloaded on desktops through iTunes were 1.2GB for the iPhone and 1.4GB for the iPad.

"Most interesting is the fact that the launch noticeably increased the total volume of traffic during peak hours. This presents a unique challenge for operators, since they must engineer their networks for peak demand, and Apple product launches and software updates are infrequent in nature," Sandvine wrote. "Several of Sandvine’s customers were closely monitoring the traffic demand the launch would cause, and based on the results we observed, we expect they will have a plan in place to manage the load when iOS 8 launches next year."

OS X Mavericks also placed a heavier-than-usual load on networks because this year's new version of the Mac operating system was free and a little bigger than the previous year's.

 

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Overall, streaming video is still dominating Internet traffic. We noted a few months ago that "Netflix and YouTube alone account for nearly half of all Internet traffic to homes in North America during peak hours." Unsurprisingly, that is now more than half:

"YouTube continues to see growth in its share, now accounting for 18.7 percent of peak downstream traffic, up 9 percent from our 1H 2013 study," Sandvine wrote. "This growth is likely not caused by the adoption of paid channels, but instead by continued growth of smartphone and tablet use within the home (i.e., 'Home Roaming'). While changes in share have been relatively minor, most interesting is the fact that Netflix and YouTube now combine to account for over 50 percent of downstream traffic."

BitTorrent is no longer the beast it once was in terms of overall traffic share. "As observed in previous reports, BitTorrent continues to lose share and now accounts for just 7.4 percent of traffic during peak period, and file sharing as a whole now accounts for less than 10 percent of total daily traffic," Sandvine wrote. "This demonstrates a sharp decline in share. Long are the days when file sharing accounted for over 31 percent total daily traffic, as we had revealed in our 2008 report."

YouTube and Facebook are dominating cellular network traffic:

This next chart shows that if you're looking to watch YouTube when quality is best, you should avoid the lunchtime and evening hours:

Actual throughput (80th percentile) achieved by YouTube from a number of US Internet service providers (both cable and DSL) for one week (all days overlaid) as collected in September 2013.

Sandvine

"What is instantly noticeable in the chart is the fact that YouTube has two pronounced dips," Sandvine wrote. "The first may not surprise some as it occurs during the evening peak period when networks are most congested. The second dip, however, is far more interesting as it occurs over the lunch hour."

While we've previously pinned the blame for poor YouTube quality on the business decisions of ISPs, Sandvine said Google deserves blame, too. Hulu (albeit with a lighter traffic load) doesn't suffer the same lunchtime and evening quality degradation, and the YouTube problems were consistent across ISPs. "[W]e can conclude that the quality degradation is likely occurring because of an oversubscription in the Google server farm (where YouTube is hosted), which makes YouTube unable to meet high video demand during lunch time and European evening," Sandvine wrote. "This oversubscription would result from a commercial decision by YouTube regarding how much capital they wanted to invest in server capacity to maintain quality."

Sandvine also provided some data relevant to the debate over data caps or "usage-based billing," which charge consumers extra when they go over the data limit prescribed by their Internet service provider.

 

"In North America, the top 1 percent of subscribers who make the heaviest use of the network’s upstream resources account for 39.8 percent of total upstream traffic," Sandvine wrote. "The comparable downstream users account for 10.1 percent of downstream bytes. At the opposite end of the usage spectrum, the network’s lightest 50 percent of users account for only 6.8 percent of total monthly traffic."