Craig Labovitz, founder & CEO of network management services provider Deepfield knowing my interest in all things Apple shared this graphic about the impact of the release of iOS 7.1 (that runs on Apple’s iDevices) on the networks. He pointed out that this traffic includes bits from Apple data centers as well as all the Apple traffic on Akamai and Level3 CDN. And ditto for the other services. As Craig said, the released “crushed some networks.”
At my office (with 14 sites around the country) we routinely block iOS updates — even the non-major releases — when we know they’re coming. Then we release the block a week or so after the rush. That pushes all the iOS update traffic onto someone else’s network and it preserves our Internet and WAN bandwidth for business uses.
Reblogged this on Taste of Apple and commented:
Apple has one of the most consistent user bases when it comes to updates, and many people update fairly soon after updates are released. Because iOS 7.1 is a step up over the original releases of 7.0-7.0.6, this huge increase is not too surprising.
If you install an osx server on the lan it will transparently cache apple updates and serve them locally, it makes a huge difference. Doesn’t need to be a big machine either we use 5 year old mac pro that also doubles as a time machine server.