Seventeen European neutral internet exchange points, CATNIX among them, have participated in this process offering many traffic statistics to be compiled. The main difference between this study and the UEFA Euro 12 one is that in the latter the matches took place at set times out of office hours in the RIPE NCC service region whereas the Olympics had events running all day, including during office hours.
The study of the exchanged traffic has pointed out the special interest of the audience in certain events, such as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games that took place on Friday, 27 July 2012. The graphic beside shows the traffic volume at LINX (London Internet Exchange) on Fridays. The dotted lines show the traffic of three weeks before the Olympics and the week after. The red line shows the Friday of the opening ceremony traffic whereas the green and the blue lines show the traffic the two weeks after. The red line looks quite different from all the others: there is a clear drop in the traffic just when the opening ceremony begins at around 20:00 UTC.
Given the fact that many of the sports competitions’ took place during office hours, the graphics analyzed have shown almost the opposite pattern of peaks and troughs that we saw in UEFA Euro 2012: instead of people going offline during matches they went online during popular events in office hours.
An example can be observed through LINX traffic in August, 1st at 15:00 UTC, when there was a connection peak coinciding with Bradley Wiggins winning the cycling golden medal (see lateral graphic).
For further data, please go here.