Mobile working Toolkit

Snowy Monday saw spike in VPN, mobile usage

Tags:
Websites,
Load,
Management Systems,
Morning

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 03 Feb 2009 17:21 GMT

Monday's snow-induced chaos across much of England led to a spike in remote-access traffic, according to the internet service provider PlusNet.

Dave Tomlinson, from the ISP's product team, wrote a blog on Monday saying that PlusNet's remote-access traffic doubled, with a slight increase in standard HTTP traffic as well. He classified "remote access traffic" as including VPN applications, remote desktop, SSH, VNC and the like.

"This is something we always have on our radar, and if necessary, we can make changes on the fly to our traffic management systems to be able to cope with higher than normal levels of certain types of traffic like this," Tomlinson wrote. "Fortunately, today we've only had to make a couple of small tweaks but we will be monitoring both the weather and traffic on the network very closely while there’s still snow in case we need to switch the configuration on the traffic management systems."

Mobile networks were also strained, with Orange reporting what it called "the biggest Monday in mobile for years".

"We have seen an uplift in usage across the entire network," the operator said in a statement. "The biggest spike for calls and texts was in the morning between 7am and 8.30am when people were contacting their work to say they couldn't make it in. Throughout the day, the mobile data network has seen a considerable uplift with people logging on from home to keep up to speed with work. Wi-Fi usage is also up."

A spokesperson for Vodafone told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that the operator had seen "busy pockets", particularly in the London area, but no actual technical problems. The spokesperson said that, between 7am and midday, Vodafone's network had handled 50 percent more voice calls, 58 percent more texts and 14 percent more mobile broadband traffic than that seen on a normal Monday morning. Between 7am and 8am, Vodafone's MMS traffic increased by 800 percent, as its customers sent picture messages of snow.

Travel websites took a hit, with the Journey Planner facility on Transport for London's (TfL) site operating slowly for patches of Monday morning, as hordes of commuters tried to find out whether their trains and tubes were running. South West Trains' website also experienced difficulties and, on Tuesday morning, the National Rail Enquiries site was still running a cut-down homepage to deal with the number of commuters trying to catch up with the availability of services.

The website monitoring and load testing company NCC Group sent out a statement on Monday, criticising the travel websites for not being able to cope with the sudden demand. "Despite forewarning, a number of travel companies have underestimated the number of travellers logging on," said NCC chief executive Rob Cotton in the statement. "It is essential that travel providers load test their websites ahead of periods of expected high volumes of traffic to avoid costly downtime, which can be damaging to an organisation's image and leave travellers in limbo."

TfL, however, told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that its site had at no point on Monday crashed. "The TfL website uses a large network of over 15,000 servers worldwide to deliver content to customers," the statement read. "This ensures that the site is ready to withstand sudden peaks in customer demand. Throughout the recent period of winter weather, Transport for London's website was constantly updated to ensure that Londoners were kept aware of developments and find the best method of getting to and from work. Between 7am and 8am on Monday morning, the website received over two million page views from people wishing to check before they travelled — over thirty times the normal demand."