The problem for us is more a case of getting the forecasting right than anything else. 2 years or so ago very few people had heard of, never mind used YouTube, as at last June it was 10% of the Internet traffic. iPlayer 2 months ago was probably a fraction of 1% and is now 5% of our traffic. Over time usage continues to increase and we have to adapt to and predict how and when that usage is used, in particular we have to buy capacity for the busiest hours of the week.
Those hours though may shift and the type of traffic may change and that's what we have to be on top of. Sunday nights for example tend to be busier than others for gaming whereas Monday nights there's more people online in total and every second Tuesday of the month it's Windows update time which than carries on as a pattern Wednesday morning and evening. Then from there who knows what the next big thing might be? Could be iTunes movies, HD streaming from somewhere else or something else entirely.
But that's only the PlusNet perspective as I say, for the ISPs that don't have clear usage allowances, or advertise "unlimited" or don't receive extra revenue from customers going over the allowance then there are the concerns of what they need to do to pay for the extra usage.
This data may be of interest to some, this is the usage data for our customers for January divided into 10% chunks (just over 200,000 customers in total) in GB:
Mean usage across all customers was 6.74GB in January, ignoring the top 10% mean usage was 2.88GB for the remaining 90%. As I say with our forecasting we need to see where those percentiles are headed, a 0.5GB (about 2 hours of iPlayer streaming) increase in that 2.88GB actually represents an extra 90,000GB of data used and translating to cost if that's all spread out over 16 hours about £34,000 extra cost per month, if it's all in the evening then about £68,000 per month. Wouldn't like to fund that if there wasn't an increase in revenue coming in from the extra usage.
To put it into perspective we have over 200,000 broadband customers, which, although doesn't put us up in the tier 1 marketplace with the big names like BT, Talk Talk, Orange, Sky, Virgin, etc. does make us the biggest in the tier 2 market. Including cable and based around the latest available data http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3361-ofcom-publishes-market-data-for-second-quarter-of-2007.html that gives us roughly 1.5% of the UK market.
Imagine how silly it would be to say "grocery stores, who are in the business of selling food, are doomed because the demand for food is large and getting larger." I really like that quote, it does so much to illustrate things.
Part of my job at PlusNet is looking at how much capacity we require and as you can probably guess we need more in February 2008 than we did in December 2007 because of natural growth in customer numbers and because of increased usage. But when you look at usage as a commodity that's a good thing. If a GB was a kilo of potatoes or sausages then our existing customers between them are all buying more potatoes and sausages than before and we are getting new customers buying even more. And in case you were wondering where I'm going with the potatoes and sausages you can move it a step further because the customers by and large aren't buying 2GB, 5GB, 10GB, etc. they are "buying" iPlayer or iTunes or YouTube or whatever and the amount of bandwidth is just the end bill like the amount of electricity or in the analogy the sausage and potatoes while they are actually buying bangers and mash.
The difference is where you are transferring data to and from and what makes up that infrastructure. On BT IPStream we pay around £17,000 per month per 155Mbps segment of capacity to transfer data from our network on to BT's network and ultimately on to our customers.
Essentially what that is, rather than a single fibre connection that links point A and point B (in the Co-Lo example point A is the server itself and point B the host's gateway on to the Internet) but is a fibre link that connects point A to 5000+ point Bs (each local telephone exchange). And that's really the only way of providing a broadband service nationally, as yet none of the LLU suppliers in the country cover as many exchanges as BT Wholesale and the cable isn't expanding to any new areas right now.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem for us is more a case of getting the forecasting right than anything else. 2 years or so ago very few people had heard of, never mind used YouTube, as at last June it was 10% of the Internet traffic. iPlayer 2 months ago was probably a fraction of 1% and is now 5% of our traffic. Over time usage continues to increase and we have to adapt to and predict how and when that usage is used, in particular we have to buy capacity for the busiest hours of the week.
Those hours though may shift and the type of traffic may change and that's what we have to be on top of. Sunday nights for example tend to be busier than others for gaming whereas Monday nights there's more people online in total and every second Tuesday of the month it's Windows update time which than carries on as a pattern Wednesday morning and evening. Then from there who knows what the next big thing might be? Could be iTunes movies, HD streaming from somewhere else or something else entirely.
But that's only the PlusNet perspective as I say, for the ISPs that don't have clear usage allowances, or advertise "unlimited" or don't receive extra revenue from customers going over the allowance then there are the concerns of what they need to do to pay for the extra usage.
This data may be of interest to some, this is the usage data for our customers for January divided into 10% chunks (just over 200,000 customers in total) in GB:
Customers Average GB per customer
0-10% 0.10
11-20% 0.32
21-30% 0.61
31-40% 1.01
41-50% 1.55
51-60% 2.34
61-70% 3.61
71-80% 5.81
81-90% 10.53
91-100% 41.51
Mean usage across all customers was 6.74GB in January, ignoring the top 10% mean usage was 2.88GB for the remaining 90%. As I say with our forecasting we need to see where those percentiles are headed, a 0.5GB (about 2 hours of iPlayer streaming) increase in that 2.88GB actually represents an extra 90,000GB of data used and translating to cost if that's all spread out over 16 hours about £34,000 extra cost per month, if it's all in the evening then about £68,000 per month. Wouldn't like to fund that if there wasn't an increase in revenue coming in from the extra usage.
To put it into perspective we have over 200,000 broadband customers, which, although doesn't put us up in the tier 1 marketplace with the big names like BT, Talk Talk, Orange, Sky, Virgin, etc. does make us the biggest in the tier 2 market. Including cable and based around the latest available data http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3361-ofcom-publishes-market-data-for-second-quarter-of-2007.html that gives us roughly 1.5% of the UK market.
The difference is where you are transferring data to and from and what makes up that infrastructure. On BT IPStream we pay around £17,000 per month per 155Mbps segment of capacity to transfer data from our network on to BT's network and ultimately on to our customers. Essentially what that is, rather than a single fibre connection that links point A and point B (in the Co-Lo example point A is the server itself and point B the host's gateway on to the Internet) but is a fibre link that connects point A to 5000+ point Bs (each local telephone exchange). And that's really the only way of providing a broadband service nationally, as yet none of the LLU suppliers in the country cover as many exchanges as BT Wholesale and the cable isn't expanding to any new areas right now.