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Surprise!
That is what Apple said to both customers and network operators yesterday when it released new versions of its desktop OS (10.9), mobile OS (7.0.3), and productivity suites (iLife and iWork) for free yesterday.
With a digital distribution now in place on both desktop and mobile devices, Apple has the ability to cause a tremendous impact on networks because of the size of these updates and the number of people that have their products.
As a personal example, in my home we have an iMac, a MacBook Pro, an iPad, and two iPhones and when updating all of these devices yesterday, I downloaded over 20 GBs of updates yesterday.
So what does that look like to an operator? Below is Apple update traffic as captured from a portion of one fixed network in North America which shows almost a 10x increase over typical Apple update levels.
So what’s the cause for the increase? It’s likely a combination of larger file sizes (OS X 10.8 was 4.4 GB, OS X 10.9 was 5.0 GB), the free price tag, and increased user base size. With theHow does that compare to when OS X 10.8 was launched last July as a $19.99 update? Last year, on the same network, we observed only a 6x increase in traffic.
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