So much can change in four years: At the last presidential inaugural, there was no widespread Internet video, no YouTube, no iPhone, no Twitter, no Facebook, no mainstream texting. And broadband wasn’t nearly as widespread in workplaces and residences. So when President Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States this week, no one really knew if the networks would hold up to the expected traffic overload, predicted to happen given the worldwide demand to view the historic moment wherever one happened to be (i.e., stuck at work), and the unprecedented number of people that descended, wireless-ready, on the National Mall.
The verdict? They did OK.
Content delivery provider Akamai reports that its global Web traffic peaked at a record level of more than 7 million simultaneous data streams (at more than 2 terabits per second), the majority of them live. In contrast, the company’s daily average is less than 1 million simultaneous streams.
CNN.com delivered 21.3 million video streams, it said, with 1.3 million of them live and simultaneously. That handily beats the 5.3 million streams it supported on Election Day. And by 1 p.m., MSNBC.com said it had delivered over nine million live streams.
Meanwhile, some Web sites and data networks had trouble keeping up. Keynote Systems Inc., a Web site performance tracker, said the Internet's top 40 sites were slowed by as much as 60 percent during the inaugural ceremony, including CNN, which was inaccessible at points.
Twitter was one casualty: “Some folks did experience a 2-5 minute delay receiving updates," a Twitter blog entry said, citing the overwhelming number of people posting to the micro-blogging site during yesterday’s historic events.
One of the differences between this event and say, following election results or checking in on a sports event, is the fact that those activities generate smaller and more spread out bursts of traffic. But the inauguration occupied a focused, specific noon-to-1 p.m. time window, which led to thick streams of data flowing into the data centers.
On the wireless front, the major carriers had spent millions — AT&T Inc. spent $4 million itself, it said — to upgrade the networks with a variety of permanent and temporary measures to support the expected millions of attendees to the event. In the end, Verizon Wireless reported five times the normal call volume in the Washington, D.C. area, but said most calls went through on the first try. AT&T and T-Mobile USA reported congestion on some cell towers, but said they redirected traffic to less-crowded towers.
The Associated Press reported that some users found coverage to be spotty, with text messages that were delayed an hour.
