Comment Re:What's the Problem? (Score 1) 249
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.
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.
