A day after what may have been the biggest test of event-related strain on modern US communications, there appear to be mixed results. Cellphone networks seem to have coped with the spike in demand caused by Barack Obama taking office, but Internet streaming was far from perfect.

Most cellphone network providers say traffic tripled during the event (T-Mobile says its figures were up ten-fold) but they were largely able to cope with demand. At this stage it’s hard to tell if the networks correctly guessed demand or whether appeals for users to opt for voice calls rather than data-intensive texts or picture messages paid off.

Web sites offering streaming video coverage of the event didn’t fare so well. While demand was strong (CNN reported 21 million people accessing streams across the day), there are widespread reports of users being shunted into virtual waiting rooms or simply not getting any video.

The big question now is whether Internet streaming capacity could be improved even further, or whether providers will conclude that such major events are so rare that it’s not efficient to try to meet all demand. It will also be interesting to see what happens during future major events which take place in the evening: it may be that many people who’d normally have stuck to watching on TV were watching on work computers either because they had high-speed connections or because office managers wouldn’t let them watch a TV screen.

Social media sites look to have done well from the day with traffic notably up. Facebook says millions of members were logged in during the inauguration (which is likely true at any other time as well), but was more specific in saying that an average of 4,000 people a minute changed their status update during the ceremony, peaking at 8,500 during the first minute of Obama’s speech.

Twitter says the poetically-named ‘tweaks per minute’ rate (pictured) rose to five times normal levels during the ceremony. It reports some users experienced delays of between two and five minutes in receiving updates and says it will analyze this to try to make sure it doesn’t happen during future spikes.

Online retailers didn’t do so well. One site which hosts sites for such businesses said traffic was down 40 percent during the ceremony and 20 percent for the rest of the day.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 4:03 pm under Online video, Social Media, Technology, Web2.0.

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