Category: APAC

PSY makes the Internet a bit more “Gentleman-ly”

April 15th, 2013 by Cam Cullen
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    The Internet is no longer all about Gangnam Style, it has become a bit more Gentleman- like. Unless you have been living in a cave, you have undoubtedly heard, heard of, or seen the video for Gangnam Style. It does have over 1 billion views:

    gangnamstyle

    PSY released his new single on YouTube over the weekend, and it is already off to a big start. It has over 62 million views (not quite a billion yet!):
    gentleman
    The question for broadband operators – did it effect their usage over the weekend?

    The answer is “Probably not” unless you were in specific places. A survey of our customer base in North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East did not see an overall rise in traffic (specifically video or YouTube). But APAC did see an increase – both on a day-over-day basis as well as over recent days.

    In one Southeast Asian mobile operator, YouTube traffic peaked 10% higher on the weekend from a normal weekend. Not massive, but significant.

    A fixed broadband network much closer to PSY’s home base was up even higher – with an increase of 30% over normal for HTTP Media streaming (preferred by Apple Devices).

    Consumer broadband networks were not the only ones that were affected – one South Korean university’s traffic was up almost 50% for the past weekend compared to earlier this month (although to be fair video consumption at the university has been creeping up since the beginning of April).

    It would be interesting to dig deeper into the stats to see which versions of the video are generating the most traffic. (unfortunately we did not have that setup on these networks, although it is possible). YouTube is offering seven different versions of the video (shown below):
    psygentlemenresolution
    YouTube and other content providers are becoming very good at presenting the optimum resolution for videos served to different devices – ensuring that both the correct format (i.e. Flash Video versus MP4) and the correct resolution is offered initially. This should have a very positive effect on bandwidth usage and optimization of bandwidth used by video, especially during times of congestion or for mobile subscribers trying to minimize usage to avoid cost.

    We’ll keep watching to see how this becomes popular over time.

    Go ahead – watch the video – you know you want to!

    London 2012 Summer Olympics Broadband Analytics: APAC Chimes in

    August 6th, 2012 by Cam Cullen
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      I have talked about North America and Europe in my previous posts, but have not spent much time on Asia yet. Although Procera does not have as much coverage throughout Asia as we have in North America or Europe, some interesting tidbits have fallen out of some of our fixed and mobile deployments. APAC is a very good example of the network version of “All Politics is Local”, as what is happening in one network has no relationship to another network. General trends are great to know, but operators will find that their subscriber’s behavior does not always match the “Internet Trends”.1.  On a fixed line network in an APAC country with a very active Olympics team, the volume of P2P traffic is up at the Internet peering point. However, the change is mainly in P2P Streaming applications, and the change from normal is entirely in the upload bandwidth. The upload bandwidth means that people are sharing video streams rather than just downloading them, and this spike is statistically significant, as shown in Figure 1. The most popular applications were Funshion, QVOD, PPFilm, TVU Player, and SopCast, all of which are popular P2P Video sharing applications. The interesting takeaway is that since this traffic is measured at the peering point exiting the country, the video streams are likely being consumed by people that do not have the same level of access to the broadcast or streaming video as in the originating country (re-enforcing the importance for content providers to find legitimate delivery mechanisms for their content).

       

      2. In this same country, video traffic, just as we saw in some networks in North America, dipped on Sunday, but the climb back to normal levels was not as quick (as shown in Figure 2). However, by the end of the week, the traffic levels were above normal, as people not only returned to video streaming, but increased their consumption. The spike in video was attributed almost completely to Flash Video traffic from YouTube (which just happens to stream the Olympics for this country for the IOC. The drop in streaming was HTTP Media streams, which are popular for the IOS-based products from Apple (that do not run Flash). This likely indicates that people were not using those mobile devices as much for streaming, but were instead watching broadcast or P2P video on other devices.

       

      3. In the “no news is good news” category, another APAC mobile operator has seen no real change in usage since the start of the Olympics. This country is not as active in the Olympics as the country discussed above, so it is likely that the viewing is small enough to not encourage users that are not already video or social networking inclined to take to their mobile devices for Olympics updates. Levels of video streaming, P2P, and web browsing are all within normal volumes.

       

      4. In general, P2P Olympic event “availability” has grown as the Olympics has gone on. This is not a surprise, but the big events with high seeding activity (with more than 100 seeds reporting into the main torrent indexes) online include basketball, gymnastics, volleyball, and the Opening Ceremonies are also the ones that you would expect people to want to download and archive for future viewing or are high profile events that people may have missed in real-time.

      We will continue to hunt for interesting tidbits and report when we find them!

       

       

      		 Figure 1: P2P traffic on Selected Fixed APAC Network

      Figure 2: Video Streaming on Selected Fixed APAC Network