Last week, Sandvine provided some facts and figures on the impact the closing of popular storage and back-up service Megaupload had on networks across the globe.

With the media and legal spotlight being shined on this traffic category in recent days, a number of competing sites have either decided to shut themselves down, or dramatically alter the way files are uploaded or downloaded from their servers.

One such service to make such a drastic change was FileSonic, who has halted any new uploads, and is only allowing users to download their personal files. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, at roughly 2pm EST, the U.S. Justice Department shut down Megaupload, the popular Storage and Back-Up Service which accounts for roughly 1% of total traffic on fixed access networks in North America.  Also involved in the shutdown were Megaupload’s affiliate sites, which included MegaVideo, MegaPix, MegaLive, and MegaBox.

In a controversial, incredibly strange, yet kind of catchy video released last year, Megaupload claimed to have 1 billion users, accounting for 4% of Internet traffic.

Our Global Internet Phenomena Report, which has followed the growth of the service in recent years, confirms that Megaupload was the most popular Storage and Back-Up Service in almost every region. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve all heard anecdotal and media reports of mobile subscribers getting a nasty surprise when they open their monthly bill.  CNN ran such a story in the wake of last year’s devastating natural disasters in Haiti:

Kerfye Pierre had recently returned from volunteering in the aftermath of January’s Haiti earthquake when she got the most outrageous mobile phone bill of her life.  The tab? Nearly $35,000.  “I was like, ‘That cannot be possible,’ ” the 27-year-old Washington woman said of the moment she saw that staggering monthly statement.

In another recent story, a woman visiting Egypt got a bill for $37,000 upon her return.  In this case, the provider (Telus) did provide notification of the spike in data use, but the subscriber overrode the cut off and used 1.6GB of data, resulting in the eventual bill shock.

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Much has been reported about the Egyptian Government’s shut-down of Internet access to its citizens in the wake of civic protests. While all reports properly condemn such censorship, there has been some disagreement on the way it was achieved.

The most credible reports, such as that from The Telegraph explain that the shut down involved the withdrawal of more than 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes, used by networks to establish routing between one another. When a border router is turned off or removed, its routes are automatically withdrawn, and the networks beyond it become unreachable. Egypt, although a large country, is served by a small number of border routers.

Other reports, such as this Huffington Post story, appear to be misinformed. This article blamed a solution from a U.S.-based company, Narus, whose products incorporate deep packet inspection (DPI) technology. The article then went on to call for Congress to pass rules on the use of DPI. ⁽¹⁾ It also named a variety of companies, including Sandvine, that include DPI in their solution sets.

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