akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Thu Feb 13 17:56:11 UTC 2020

On 2/13/20 12:39 PM, Ahmed Borno wrote:
> Strictly out of interest, I wanted to ask earlier if this irresponsible 
> way of causing insane, instant, bandwidth demands is breaking anything 
> on the ISP/CDN side or even the console owner ?! Or is it just an 
> interesting phenomenon that is handled without a sweat. Does it break 
> the buck in anyway?

A good service provider will plan for things like this.  They do happen 
from time to time and for reasons other than large game updates being 
dropped in the middle of the afternoon.  However, sudden large traffic 
surges can be unexpected, causing network congestion and poor 
performance for customers, and regardless they cost money to plan for.

These game updates have become very visible recently which I suspect is 
why they're getting attention.  They've also been generating traffic 
surges during or near prime time which compounds with typical streaming 
usage and is most likely to generate customer complaints.  If they were 
hitting at 4AM local, hence the discussion about consoles and such 
downloading them automatically at night, it wouldn't be nearly as big of 
a deal since network demand is typically low during those times on 
consumer-facing networks and congestion, if it occurs, is unlikely to 
generate complaint volume.
-- 
Brandon Martin