[165838] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: iOS 7 update traffic
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Mon Sep 23 09:50:21 2013
From: Joe Abley <jabley@hopcount.ca>
In-Reply-To: <aapprzfzv6.fsf@ext-dhcp-174.eduroam.unibe.ch>
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2013 09:50:02 -0400
To: Simon Leinen <simon.leinen@switch.ch>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 2013-09-23, at 09:10, Simon Leinen <simon.leinen@switch.ch> wrote:
> Glen Kent writes:
>> One of the earlier posts seems to suggest that if iOS updates were
>> cached on the ISPs CDN server then the traffic would have been
>> manageable since everybody would only contact the local sever to get
>> the image. Is this assumption correct?
>=20
> Not necessarily. I think most of the iOS 7 update traffic WAS in fact
> delivered from CDN servers (in particular Akamai). And many/most =
large
> service providers already have Akamai servers in their networks. But
> they may not have enough spare capacity for such a sudden demand -
> either in terms of CDN (Akamai) servers or in terms of capacity =
between
> their CDN servers and their customers.
I think oversubscription in the access network (between the customer and =
the ISP network that might contain Akamai nodes) is the general concern, =
at least from the ISPs I have visibility into. Your access network =
doesn't have to be a narrowband satellite network for this kind of =
unexpected demand to hurt, and provisioning extra access bandwidth in =
anticipation of a one- or two-day possibility of increased demand is not =
practical.
I don't doubt Apple are aware of the issue and will make changes if they =
can. The characterisation that Apple doesn't care, or is callously =
causing pain in other networks ignores the commercial reality that user =
experience is important to them. The user experience when an anticipated =
update can't be downloaded easily is not great.
The suggestions on how to make things better next time that have =
appeared on this list seem helpful. I would imagine that any vendor with =
a huge and widely-distributed user base would do well to take note.
Joe
