Traffic on JANET increases by 20% as all eyes are on the election!

18 MAY 2010: With the most exciting election that has taken place in many years, it’s not surprising to see that traffic over JANET rose by 20% during this period.

The graph below shows the impact of the day following the general election as people use JANET to access news updates.

The blue line covers the week of April 26th, the week before the election.  This shows a fairly normal traffic profile, until Thursday evening, where instead of a steady decline in traffic following normal working hours, you can see a noted rise mid-way throughout the evening.  This correlates with the timing of the final election debate, with many people watching online.

The red line shows the traffic on election week, beginning May 3rd.  Traffic levels are significantly lower on Monday due to the bank holiday, but return to a more typical level during the rest of the week; we then  see a rise as the results of the elections start to trickle in, and from early Friday morning, we really start to see a significant difference.

The graphs are based around two-hour averages which smooth out the short-term peaks, but show a 20% increase in traffic at peak time (early afternoon) from 56Gbit/s to 67Gbit/s. 

The five-minute average of the same values peaked at 73Gbit/s, all of which was shipped across the backbone without congestion!  The higher levels of traffic remained across the weekend as everyone followed with interest as the politicians attempted to form a government.

This change in traffic flow during major events reflect the overall trend of how people digest the news and the increasing trend for it to be distributed across the Internet.

One of the first examples of this was the funeral of the Queen Mother in 2002.  Eight years on, the quality of video has increased, and so has the amount of data it consumes.