Been a while since I posted one of these blogs, so looking at the graphs for the past two weeks I thought I'd post a couple of observations of the traffic we've been seeing. Below is the graph of iPlayer traffic from Wednesday to Sunday last week: 
Circled are three points of interest that we've noticed. The first is Thursday night, a massive 973,73Mbps spike of iPlayer traffic; a record high for iPlayer on our network and probably represents somewhere in the region of 2,000 of our customers watching iPlayer simultaneously. Like May last year with football on ITV while The Apprentice was on, last week we saw people turning to iPlayer to catch up on The Apprentice the following evening and watching the football on Wednesday. Only this year the spike was 50% higher as presumably more and more people are using the Internet to catch up on TV they miss. The second and third circled points are Saturday and Sunday morning; people watching the Malaysian Grand Prix online. The qualifying session on Saturday and the race on Sunday. This one is a bit of a change from what we've seen in the past. Previously, live sporting events tend to have only caused noticeable spikes in traffic when they've been shown on a weekday during working hours; people watching online at work because there's no TV handy. But these spike are at a weekend. Maybe this is still people at work, or people staying in bed and watching on the laptop. We'll have to keep a look out when the Grand Prixs move to Europe and see if we see lunchtime spikes. Coming up we're expecting to see plenty of traffic after the new Doctor Who on Saturday evening and Robin Hood seems to have upped the volume of iPlayer on a Sunday. Dave Tomlinson Plusnet Network Transformation
F1 and The Apprentice on iPlayer