UK ISP Zen Internet Sees Traffic Surge on England v Wales Match
Broadband ISP Zen Internet has informed us that last night’s FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 match between England and Wales, which saw England walk away with a 3-0 win, resulted in a mild internet traffic peak between 7pm and 9pm that was 9% more than the average traffic for that day and time.
Broadly, we aren’t expecting last night to set any particular traffic records, since a lot of people will have been watching it at home over digital terrestrial signals, rather than streaming over their broadband or mobile data connection. A quick look at the data traffic passing through the London Internet Exchange (LINX) last night shows an elevated peak, albeit nothing particularly remarkable.
By comparison, England’s first FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 match against Iran resulted in significantly higher peaks of usage (here), which is partly because it occurred during the working hours of a normal Monday afternoon (i.e. a lot of people will have streamed it while at work).
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Paul Stobart, CEO at Zen Internet, said:
“Fans across the country tuned in last night to watch two UK nations battle it out at the FIFA World Cup, with England versus Wales in Qatar streamed live on BBC iPlayer and the BBC Sport website. At Zen, this coincided with a traffic peak between 7pm and 9pm, 9% more than the average traffic we experienced around the same time on a normal weekday in November. With the football alone causing notable peaks in web traffic across our network, these major games are another example of the nation’s love for streaming sport via the internet.”
End.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Surely this should have a link to the Zen article last week detailing their terrible performance issues under load? https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2022/11/uk-isp-zen-internet-resolves-network-performance-issue.html
I don’t think Zen deserve to push press releases like this while at the same time denying to wholesale partners they have on-going performance issues. Their engineering management fail to acknowledge issues, even when brought to them by multiple partners.
I’ve previously recommended Zen retail and other ISPs who use Zen wholesale to friends, but given poor capacity planning at Zen in the past year I can’t do that any more. From the mid 2000s till 2020 Zen were leading edge, but the last couple of years have shown they’ve failed to invest in strong engineering talent required to run a network of their size.
It’s the compromise they’ve paid to be a large ISP – the curse of the big organisational failings.
(at least from what I’ve been hearing anyway. I shouldn’t comment on them because I have never dealt with Zen in any way).
But if I were to take a stab in the dark as to why I think Zen are ‘not what they used to be’ then I would guess that it is their repositioning towards becoming a more mass market internet provider. I remember seeing adverts on TV from them, they do a refer a friend scheme, offer more or less the same marketing as others including tailored service pages for WFH & gamers & whole home WiFi when alot of the big ISPs jumped on the trend.
With respect to price, they aren’t even that expensive. Certainly not cheap but perhaps on the upper end of ‘mid-market’ pricing.
Bundle all of that with offering wholesale products, running their own LLU infrastructure, domain registration and hosting, MLPS/Ethernet and a growing customer base with more FTTP customers & bandwidth across their backhaul, core and backbone network then it might help to explain why they appear to have an organisational failure with respect to running their network.
Put simply I can not help but think that they are maybe doing too much.
However, I also like to think that they can indeed bounce back from the network problems. With more investment put into engineers and further equipment upgrades then hopefully it will all just work out magically. Like I wrote above I have no business with them and don’t want to see them fail in any way.
The answer is actually quite simple.
There’s been a big exodus of staff from their engineering teams over several years. Very few experienced staff now remain. It’s starting to show in many ways.
Not just Zen, Gamma were down the toilet for the match on 21st Nov [hundreds of latency alerts]. Bit of a surprise as Gamma are usually solid.
Was it Gamma latency via FTTC/FTTP connections? Maybe those were being wholesaled by Zen. Same occurred for some IDNET customers who found out their connections are via the Zen wholesale platform during that congestion incident.
I can confidentiality say I’ve not contributed to their network traffic watching the footie.
Isn’t this just obvious news applicable to probably all the ISP’s?
Free advertising for Zen though to have such a “news story”…
Yea this is bizarre. Poor company to promote considering they openly wear WEF talking points as badges on their website. Maybe they should focus on their performance issues rather than eliminating carbon which exists in all life forms including humans
I bet Zen never hit 100gig. Former great ISP with potential; left behind a decade ago.. managed to trade of a former reputation. Richard should have sold his play thing years ago. RIP Zen.
They are already past 100gig, well into 250-300s of retail traffic. Agree with your point regarding Richard, indeed he should have either sold it (to someone like Cityfibre) or taken external investment. Becoming a B corporation has put it into a position of not being able to pay high salaries to attract high calibre technical leadership (and losing out to Altnets when hiring, he’s acknowledged this at a LINX event himself) and having limited funds to make major investments in their UK network.
Given Zen’s history if they’d of focussed on connectivity instead of their hosting distractions then they could’ve had an excellent UK network with presences in multiple DCs for regional peering and NNI hand off. Look at PeeringDB with their limited presence in a couple of London and Manchester sites.
@anon, I don’t quite see why being a B-Corp limits their execution capabilities. If they sell service at a price that makes a profit, which is necessary to remain in operation, then they should have enough to make the investments needed in capacity and provide a service that meets the advertised spec.
Isn’t one of the most highly praised (and equally pilloried for their data caps) ISPs A&A much smaller than Zen?
Goes to show that their problems are not necessarily a lack of money or talent, but more likely a purposeful choice to maintain a certain level of operating expenses and a corresponding consumer price level. Perhaps a good comparison would be Hutchison 3G, which bids itself as low-cost and has a large and stable clientele despite widespread complaints about their network performance being mid-tier when compared to their more expensive peers.