Would you leave your ISP if it adopted Phorm?

Yes - 56.6%
What is Phorm? - 24.7%
Maybe (opt-in method acceptable) - 16.2%
No - 2.3%

Total Votes: 1098

Grand Theft Auto IV was released on 29th April, looking at our reports, gaming traffic on the 29th was roughly in line with the previous Tuesday; there was no noticeable increase in traffic. This may well be because a lot of people bought it online and didn’t receive it until the following day or those that did get it decided to play it offline rather than online that first evening.

The early hours of Wednesday [30th] morning (4am to 7am) saw an increase in gaming traffic of between 15% and 35% compared with the Wednesday before. Wednesday morning saw the biggest increase in usage with up to 65% more gaming traffic per hour than the previous week. Usage during the rest of the day saw an increase of around 30 to 40%.

Comparing that instead to Tuesday and usage across most of Wednesday was up to 50% higher.

The busiest hour for gaming was 8pm to 9pm on 30th April, followed closely by 9pm to 10pm. In fact the 8 to 9pm hour was actually the busiest hour for gaming in the past 6 months (and 9 to 10pm the second busiest) in terms of usage and very probably the busiest hour we’ve ever seen for gaming. The previous highest hour was 9 to 10pm on 4th November 2007, 8 to 9pm on 30th April beat that by almost 30%.

To add a bit more perspective, gaming accounted for approximately 7.6% of all downloads between 8pm to 9pm on 30th April, we’d normally expect to see between 3.5% and 5% be gaming around that time of day. (It was about 7.1% for 9 to 10pm).

Vodafone has itself been keen to buy the UK arm of Tiscali but for far less than the £800m asking price. City sources say that the deal between The Carphone Warehouse and America's Best Buy has changed everything. Until now, BT has had a two-way deal with Vodafone, with each company reselling the other's products.

'If Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone bought Tiscali and became the UK's biggest internet firm, Vodafone would reconsider its arrangement with BT,' said one source. Vodafone sources said that no talks had taken place with The Carphone Warehouse, which was ditched last year as a seller of Vodafone mobile phone contracts.

"We are very excited to be financing the expansion of Kontiki," said Mark Koulogeorge, principal, MK Capital. "The company has a unique and tested peer-to-peer (P2P) technology that addresses the need to efficiently distribute video over the Internet and private networks. The new generation of Internet users will demand video content in order to be engaged. As the use of video as a communication tool continues to expand, Kontiki's technology will be increasingly strategic to corporations worldwide."

"Bournemouth is the first town we will be covering, but Northampton is certainly not being ignored," he said. "Our next step is to engage with the authorities in Northampton and conduct a feasibility study, with a view to providing complete coverage there in the next 12 months."