Yesterday, Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 7 was released to the public.

We had

already covered the surge in traffic caused by iOS app updates being released on Tuesday evening, so today I thought I would take a look at the impact that downloading the actual OS made. With two iPhones and an iPad in my household, and knowing that I personally downloaded over 5GB of software and app updates yesterday, I was still kind of surprised by iOS 7’simpact .

Below is a report from a single North American fixed access operator, showing both the bandwidth and traffic share that Apple Updates accounted for over the past few days. Upon release at 1PM ET, Apple Updates immediately became almost 20% of total network traffic, and continued to stay above 15% of total traffic into the evening peak hours.

What I found most interesting is that the launch noticeably increased the total volume of traffic during peak hours. This presents a unique challenge for operators, since they must engineer their networks for peak demand, and Apple product launches and software updates are infrequent in nature.

Apple introduced over-the-air (OTA) updates last year which allow users to download changes to the core OS, but Apple has still has yet to implement any kind of incremental update system for apps like Android. This means that users consume significantly more bandwidth when updating apps, and creates the potential for bill shock given that that Apple now allows app updates up to 100MB on a cellular network.

In talking to a few of our customers, I know they were closely paying attention to the traffic demand the launch would cause, and based on the results we observed,  I expect even more will do so when iOS 8 launches next year.

Last year we published some numbers the day after iOS 6 launched, that showed how traffic to Apple’s updates servers increased as much as nine times .

Today Apple releases the next version of its mobile operating system, iOS 7.  While at the time of this posting, you can’t get access to the final code unless you have a developer’s license (if history repeats itself, everyone should be able to get it around 1pm EDT), the update has already begun to make an impact on one fixed access network in North America.

How is this? Yesterday evening Apple allowed developers to finally release updates to their applications so that they can take advantage of the new features and design language found in the new OS. My iPad at home has 27 updates, and in looking at my iPhone’s update history, between yesterday and today I have already had 18 updates.

 As you can see in the photo above (yes, I’m already running iOS 7), some of the apps publishing updates are among the most popular in the App Store. This means that many subscribers are likely getting prompted for updates already as well.

Below is a chart from a single North American fixed operator comparing Apple App Store traffic yesterday, with that of the previous two Tuesdays in September. The chart shows yesterday’s traffic being fairly average during the day, but then a significant uptick in traffic occurred as iOS 7 compatible apps were released in the evening, with the App Store generating 74% more traffic between the hours of 8PM and midnight EDT.

Major software releases from Apple actually have a larger impact on fixed networks than mobile, because Apple prevents users from updating apps over 50MB (Edit: Looks like Apple raised the limit to 100MB today.) using their cellular radio. This means that major OS updates, and large apps such as games need to be downloaded on fixed networks and then devices updated via Wi-Fi or through iTunes.

When I installed the gold master version of iOS 7 on my iPhone it was 1.2GB in size, and when you combine that with the multitude of app updates developers are pushing out I would expect to once again see a significant spike in traffic to Apple’s update servers today.

Be sure to check back tomorrow, for a detailed analysis on the impact that the launch of iOS 7 made.

Everybody relax. That Google outage on Friday likely did not cause global consumer internet traffic to instantly drop by 40%. Might it have still been significant? Absolutely.

In our 1H 2013 Global Internet Phenomena Report we revealed that YouTube accounts for 15.43% of total traffic during peak period on fixed access networks in North America. While no other Google service cracks the top 10 in bandwidth use, it’s safe to assume that popular services such as Search, Google+, and Maps likely account for a combined 5% of traffic. This means that with the Google outage on Friday, consumer Internet traffic in North America likely experienced a very short 15-20% decline.

While Google is major mover of Internet traffic, and the outage likely impacted many total subscribers, because its total duration was between 1-5 minutes, the overall impact on total Internet use for the day was negligible.

Just for those interested, below I have pulled out individual reports on total YouTube and Google+ usage from a US fixed access network, so you can visualize how people were briefly unable to spend their Friday evening watching movie trailers or sharing their thoughts on donuts.

 

 

 

 

 

It seems like everyone has #RoyalBaby fever, so being Canadian, I thought I would take a look at how a fellow Commonwealth country responded to the announcement of our mutual (potential) future Head of State.

On the mobile network I examined, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and various other social or video sites saw very little change in traffic when comparing levels to the previous week. Twitter on the other hand saw a noticeable jump (or bump) in bandwidth and volume of tweets. The chart below (using British Summer Time) shows how the spike in bandwidth coincided with the official birth announcement from the Clarence House twitter account, which is the official account of the London residence of The Prince of Wales, The Duchess of Cornwall and Prince Harry.

Since the network’s peak traffic actually occurred eight hours prior to the birth announcement, the increase in Twitter traffic likely had little to no impact on the network’s ability to deliver a high quality of experience to subscribers. It does however reinforce the idea that major news events can significantly impact network traffic, and network operators need to ensure their networks are prepared for the increased traffic load, should the next major event occur during peak period.