Though not a lot of the requests were mobile, imagine in two year's time, five years, or ten years when hundreds of millions more people are on their mobile devices all requesting the same information. Whether it is election results, disasters, or some historic event unfolding, people used to do their best to get a radio or television set.
No longer. You grab your iPhone or Blackberry and you start googling or fire up the browser to see what CNN.com has. Here's a taste of what happened yesterday when news of Michael Jackson broke.
- Between 2:40PM and 3:15PM PST, users experienced a slow down accessing Google News.
- Around that time, my Twitter access slowed, messages weren't getting in or out. Twitter.com finally posted a note that they were overloaded. I got the whale page.
- TMZ.com, site that broke the news of Jackson's death, went down several times.
- CNN.com reported 5X increase in traffic. LA Times was not accessible for a time. The Times had reporters on the ground supposedly twittering and send in reports.
- Wiki was updated with Michael Jackson's death date less than an hour after he passed.
- Mashable.com reports 30% of tweets were about Michael. In fact, a local news anchor in Los Angeles said at one point, 50% of tweets were about Michael Jackson. That one I found difficult to swallow.
I'm sure Internet traffic increased dramatically for other news outlets as well as IM chatters. I'll be interested to see the statistics for mobile access in the coming weeks.
So just imagine 10-50X more mobile traffic in the coming years.
Source: CNN
Note: I can see why the puny wireless providers are so afraid of giving their users unlimited access to their networks. They are just afraid to admit they care more about profit than about services they promise to deliver.
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