England v Ukraine - Stress testing Digital Britain

This Saturday will be an interesting one for Digital Britain. Up to one million people will be paying between £4.99 and £11.99 to watch a football game live, or nearly live. Paying that amount of money will cause expectations to rise regarding the quality of experience delivered. I just hope, from a public order perspective, no pub owner has the bright idea of paying their £4.99 and pushing the internet delivered image on a large screen.

Will British engineering capacity to manage disasters keep everything going ok, or will the shortcomings of our infrastructure become apparent?

The task at hand, is to deliver a TV experience to a million users over an infrastructure designed for web browsing. There will be some interesting discussions taking place to make this run as smoothly as possible. It is not a good moment to mention Net Neutrality.

I am assuming the 1million is limited by the content distribution agreement to carry one million data streams, that's one terrabit of data per second, twice what Linx reports, and 10 times that of iPlayer. This ought to be backed off by the peering relationships between the contention distribution parners (Akamai, level3, limelight) and the ISPs who gain nothing extra from carrying this broadcast traffic. It must be really tempting for an ISP to state that they are running no special measures for this traffic unless they get a cut of the revenue.

Live will be live wth 30 seconds to 1 minute delay to give some headroom for buffering. One million live streams a 1mbps each means each user buying the service is using 30 times the peak hour capacity that is allocated to them. This is assuming the content distribution service is evenly distributed. Will they disable Iplayer while this is on? Forget P2P for the evening!

The engineers could do Digital Britain a favour and demonstrate the nature of our national data fabric and take no special measures. There would be many people asking for their money back on Monday, and the local pub might need some repair work.

The likelihood is that the ISP engineers will have a great few days, working out a plan to deal with these data streams, taking judgements on what else needs to slow down or limit. It will be treated as an emergency planning exercise and they will do a great job for which they will receive no thanks. It would be more interesting if they were took their hands off and see what happens. That might sort out a bit more investment for Digital Britain.