iOS 5 Traffic Surprises Some ISPs

iOS 5 was rolled out yesterday and when it did, it caught one ISP (probably a lot more who haven’t admitted it) by surprise. The update page of that ISP has the following statements posted:

As well as iOS 5 being launched at 6PM in the UK, Apple also rolled out updates for Mac OS X Lion to include iCloud for the desktop. Our particular update was 888MB for two desktop updates and 700+MB for the iOS 5 update. Multiply this by a lot of customers updating Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch devices then you can see why traffic levels increased a lot.

Take a look at the graph below which shows the demand seen on LONAP in London. This graph shows a neutral exchange point where many providers exchange traffic. Normal throughput is 18GB/second while the Apple update shifted that up to 28GB/second.

As well as keeping traffic flowing as smoothly as possible to Apple the other part of the equation is Apple coping with that amount of traffic on its servers. I have seen reports today of many people seeing error messages last night with some users saying updates took through the night. However, when testing myself about 3 to 4 hours after the release time I managed to get the update relatively quickly. I guess my ISP managed to cope with the demand.

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