Have you ever been out of the office and need to make a last minute change to a spreadsheet or presentation?  In a perfect world, our smart phone would support Microsoft Office and it would be easy to do a last minute update. Reality is not this simple though; for starters, you might not have WiFi in the vicinity to gain access to the office database, and trying to navigate a spreadsheet on a 4cm screen while zooming in can be challenging.

“Tethering” is a way to bring the best of both worlds together – the ubiquity of 3G service with the comfort of larger screens on laptops. Tethering is the use of an Internet-enabled mobile device as a modem for another device. It enables users to go online from their laptop while on the road when there is no other means of Internet access.

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In 2002, when Sandvine published our first Global Internet Phenomena Report, we revealed the groundbreaking news P2P traffic was the dominant source of internet traffic, in a time when many thought it was e-mail and web surfing.  Since then we’ve tracked the rise and fall of different applications and announced the arrival of an on-demand mentality.

Nine years later, after completing another round of comprehensive traffic analysis, we’re back with our Global Internet Phenomena Report: Spring 2011 and are ready to share more insights about how subscriber habits are shaping the make-up of Internet traffic, including how Real-Time Entertainment continues its path towards network dominance and how rumours of P2P Filesharing’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

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Wired magazine recently asked us for information about P2P Filesharing traffic in North America.  In response, we provided a figure from our Fall 2010 Global Internet Phenomena report which shows that P2P Filesharing was 19.2% of aggregate traffic during peak period on North America’s fixed access networks.

Wired also approached another vendor with experience in traffic identification, and it seems that there is a sizeable discrepancy between the two responses that the magazine received and reported on (8% was reported by Arbor Networks). What could cause such differing figures?

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Friday’s Royal Wedding was a truly global spectacle with a worldwide audience estimated to be near two billion viewers.  Technology and content distribution has certainly come a long way since the radio broadcast of King Edward’s famous 1939 address, (as remembered in the recent movie The King’s Speech), followed by the wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981, televised to over 750 million viewers.

Will and Kate’s WWWedding not only had incredible television ratings, but also made a considerable impact on the Internet through use of streaming media and social networks.  Sandvine’s weekend analysis of Internet traffic data proved to be exciting and offers an array of varied impressions and trends – here are some of the highlights.  Click here for the full report.

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