London Olympics Could Destroy The Internet

Businesses are being warned that the country’s internet may be slow to the point of stopping during the Olympics. The official advice in ‘Preparing your Business for the Games’ states:

It is possible that internet services may be slower during the Games or, in very severe cases, there may be dropouts due to an increased number of people accessing the internet.

Furthermore, the document states that service providers

may introduce data caps during peak times to try to spread the loading and give a more equal service to their entire customer base.

Kathryn Hurt, head of projects for MWB Business Exchange, said ‘There’s been a lot of discussion about traffic hotspots, but very little about potential internet traffic problems. The risk is that home workers are unable to work effectively due to over-capacity.’

Our advice: don’t try and play online when the women’s beach volleyball is on.

Source: The Observer

26 Comments

  1. “Don’t try and play online when the women’s beach volleyball is on” – So you are saying we should just play with ourselves?

  2. Interesting. I would expect similar (or even worse) issues to crop up around Euro 2012 as well. Demand for VOD services has scaled far faster than the capacity and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of effect these peeks have.

    • Why? Euro 2012 is in Poland/Ukraine not this country so how will that affect us? Olympics I can understand but not Euro 2012.

      • Upload or download it’s all through the same servers – the more people going through uplinks to the same places/sites at the same time increases contention ratio and often makes servers fall over. The advantage with major tournaments is that there’s generally many geographically and ISP dispersed streams that keeps traffic from being too horrendous.

        For the Olympics, I doubt it will affect many in the UK – even though there’s likely to be a lot of upstreaming, most people in the UK and nearer European countries, will watch it on traditional TV, so I think there will be little local downstreaming of footage, although it couldcause slight delays and bottlenecks on the international uplinks.

      • Lol, what on earth are you going on about?

        The Olympics will effect us in England because of all the tourists accessing the internet while they’re here for the games. Contention ratios? Huh?

    • my guess? it’ll be high for a week or two, then england will be out and it’ll die down. ^_^

  3. The story does say ‘in certain areas’. Maybe only Londoners need to worry?

    The comments in the article about public transport made me laugh. My girlfriend’s employer has already said they expect everyone to be in on time during the Olympics, I know a few others who have been told the same, the trains are going to be carnage! But will operators put extra trains on? Nuuooo. F***ing Southwest Trains, grrr.

  4. Could be just London though?

    Would it?

    • Well some of us live in London. #Posh

      • did you just hashtag a comment reply?

        and you used to do nothing but moan about Twitter :D

      • i was thinking, twitter could well go into meltdown during the olympics, this’ll be the first one where it’s been pretty much omnipresent, like it seems to be now, won’t it?

      • I’ve admitted I may of possibly been to harsh on Twitter.

        You may remember my comment was that it was full of people posting what the had for lunch. As Hideo Kojima posts EVERY single meal he has, I still stand by arguement.

      • Hypocrite! ;) I think i’ve seen you use a lot of Hashtags on twitter, TC.

        If Twitter dies during the olympics, i will do a Dan lee and spray paint my poo on Big Ben. Twitter keeps me from doing that atm. :op

      • what?! how could you….

      • There is a reason why i’m known as the TSA general/resident/CEO/VP loony Symp. ;)

  5. Oh dear. I hope the Olympics is a success all round. Things like this may easily taint it for some.

  6. Tuffcub mate, you’ll be the only person on here not watching womens beach vollyball!

  7. Women’s beach volleyball in the English summer? It’ll likely pour down and turn in to a wet T-shirt event…

  8. Until yesterday I worked in an MWB building. About 25 companies with a shared 2MB connection. Kathryn Hurt should sort her own bandwidth out and worry less about everyone else’s!

  9. So much for using the net to ignore the olympics this summer then. :( I hope those who are self employed won’t end up losing income due to this. :S

  10. If we get really unlucky one of those pesky Olympiads will delete the whole internet.

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