Sandvine and Procera Analyze the Olympics Games

 
As we are expecting new [internet traffic] records in the 2012 Olympic Games (see "Prediction: Worldwide Traffic will Double during London's Olymics" - here), driven by streaming video and social network activity, it is interesting to see the analysis made by the DPI vendors for the first days.  

Sandvine, in a blog post by Dan Deeth ("Going for the Streaming Gold" - here) looked at "..how NBC’s Live Extra Olympic Streaming has contributed to fixed access network traffic in the US ..Below is a chart showing the volume and share of traffic for NBC’s Olympic streaming over the weekend. At its peak on Sunday at around 10:00am it accounted for almost 15% of total network traffic. At this time, we believe most people were likely streaming swimming preliminaries, a hypothesis reinforced by the fact that the second peak seen at around 3:00pm also coincided with a swimming event, the men’s 4x100m freestyle relay"

Procera Networks launched a new site ("Analytics In Motion" -here) dedicated to the grand event. Procera found that "A UK mobile operator that we are monitoring is seeing a decline of 18% in mobile BBC iPlayer traffic on their network for Friday and an increase of 7%on Saturday from normal activity rates. This indicates that the Opening Ceremonies were primarily viewed on fixed or broadcast networks, but people started to watch events online on Saturday .. Social Networking traffic (mainly Facebook and Twitter) is up 25% in North America over normal weekend levels .. YouTube streaming traffic is at normal levels .. nbc.com streaming is very active, with an average of 2% of subscribers streaming on Friday and Saturday"