Lessons learned from inauguration net-traffic spike

The massive spike of Internet traffic during President Obama’s inaugural ceremony is both a lesson and a wake-up call to Internet service providers, according to one industry executive.

Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, said viewing of the Obama swearing-in via streaming video caused the largest single spike in Internet traffic since Arbor began tracking it using its Atlas tool five years ago. And while there were no massive outages, some ISPs and Web sites did have problems, Labovitz said. Those kinds of problems may become more common with more video streaming activity, especially when high-definition video streaming starts taking place.

“I think especially as we look at HD streaming, there are challenges ahead,” Labovitz said. “They are technical as much as they are, for providers, business issues. Consumers all have the same Internet connection, but now we are placing very different demands on that end connection but paying same price. All the service providers have built out networks using some basic models of usage – and that’s true for all networks, whether cellphone or telephone.”

Some of that network usage modeling goes back to the Ma Bell days, when AT&T engineers could accurately forecast usage peaks on Mother’s Day, for example, and engineer networks accordingly, Labovitz said. “Telephony was child’s play to do modeling on, compared to the Internet,” he cautioned. “But there are business models through using the efficiency of the Internet, where we can offer folks these services.”

It’s a multi-faceted problem, Labovitz said. Part of the challenge may be getting people to pay more, part of it lies in network engineering and part of it lies in traffic management, he said. “Clearly, people are going to be doing more and more video and more and more apps over the Internet. Part of the solution is finding a way that people are willing to pay for that.”

Based on Arbor’s data, the ISPs that faced the most congestion issues were those that didn’t have direct relationships with content delivery networks, which are set up to handle large quantities of video efficiently.

“Providers that have direct relationships with Limelight or large CDNs fared better than folks who didn’t,” Labovitz said. “This was a real success story for CDNs, with the sheer amount of traffic they handled. The failures seemed to be in other parts of the network where folks may have not had these relationships.”

So many content providers were offering the Obama inauguration on streaming video, and many of those at work, unable to be at home watching TV, tuned in.

“There was a whole host of organizations providing content,” Labovitz said. “We are characterizing it as a very broad spectrum,” and in that way it gave a clear picture of what lies ahead.

For some Web sites and ISPs, that picture wasn’t pretty. “There were ISPs who didn’t have enough transit capacity,” Labovitz said. “There definitely were folks who show they maxed out the connections. We’d see traffic building up – and we are talking tens of gigs -- 30 gigs, 40, 50, 100 -- and then drops so sudden that clearly something went awry.”