By all accounts it seems the Internet served British Royalty very well today and is perhaps even worthy of a knightship.  We wanted to share some early observations, because they’re just too juicy for us to savour alone with our tea and fruitcake!

We observed a significant increase in video traffic on North America’s fixed access networks, led by RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) and Flash, which both surged more than 20% above the same period last week, and a slight increase in HTTP traffic (driven by web browsing). 

There’s also a clear spike in YouTube traffic, associated with the ceremony coverage, as many subscribers “tuned in” to catch the highlight – it seems that these same subscribers then dropped off in droves, as YouTube traffic plummeted after 6:30am.

Stay tuned for more trends and Internet phenomena as we analyze the data over the weekend!

Wedding bells are in the air, and while many people are asking questions (and placing bets) about Kate’s dress, and about the honeymoon location, we at Sandvine are interested in some other things. Specifically, we want to know how the Royal wedding is going to affect Internet traffic to social media and real-time entertainment sites.

Already, chatter on social networks is reaching a fevered pitch as royal-watchers and casual observers worldwide are preparing for the occasion.  For example, according to Trendrr, blog posts have doubled in the month of April.  Also, according to Neilsen, videos tagged with Royal Wedding keywords have grown more than 10 times.  In addition to the estimated two billion television viewers across the world that will tune in for the ceremony, it is expected that 400 million people will watch the event online.

In our Global Internet Phenomena Report last fall, we reported that 43% of total Internet traffic is real-time entertainment.  With the likely growth of real-time entertainment this past half year, more and more people are turning to live web video to watch events as they happen.  We expect the most popular place to watch the royal wedding online will be YouTube, who last week announced that they will stream the entire event on their recently launched YouTube Live platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Starbucks recently announced it will expand free access to a number of additional web content providers through its in-store WiFi service. The details of the commercial agreement between Starbucks and the content providers are unknown; however, collaborative business agreements amongst network operators and content providers seem to be gaining more ground.

The infrastructure requirements required to enable the cooperation between network operators and content providers has also recently become of interest to the 3GPP standards body. On this issue, the standards body has created a technical report for the future Release 10 specification currently in draft stage, proposing a framework to standardize these types of service offerings through specific communication interfaces of the different network elements involved.

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From April 4th through 6th, members of the policy control community came together in Amsterdam for Informa’s Policy Control Conference.  The speaking session focused on specific aspects of policy control technology, like enabling new services or tips on deploying policy control architectures, and were attended by network operators, industry analysis, and solution providers.

The operator case studies were particularly interesting, as they explained real-life activities, results, and business cases being explored worldwide.  These types of presentations are always valuable because they allow the audience to really keep a finger on the pulse of the industry.  There were enough case studies to confidently reveal some trends:

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