We’ve frequently discussed and debunked the “exaflood,” a term coined by the same think tank that brought you intelligent design, created in part to justify a shift to metered billing and decreased regulation in the sector. More real was the one-day Internet Obamalypse, with Arbor Networks reporting that most carriers saw their core network traffic jump anywhere from five to forty percent yesterday during the Presidential inauguration.

“This multi terabit per second flood represents one of the single largest one day spikes in Internet traffic since ATLAS Internet Observatory monitoring began five years ago,” says Arbor’s Craig Labovitz. Traffic generated by the inauguration “handily” beat the last Internet traffic record set by the US Open. Akamai yesterday confirmed an Internet record with 7 million active simultaneous streams.

Among ISPs, Arbor says the traffic surge centered on Flash (TCP port 1935) and UDP port 8247 (CNN streaming), noting that Flash traffic spiked by more than 60% in most providers and by 400% in a few of the larger cable operators. The company says that the infrastructure of at least two unnamed ISPs couldn’t handle the strain — showing clear failures and traffic drops during the traffic peaks. Despite the failures of the two anonymous ISPs, the Internet as a whole seemed to have handled the load rather well.

Wireless networks probably felt a heavier strain, with AT&T saying they invested million just to boost capacity for the day. In Washington DC, Verizon reported call volume five times higher than normal. They also note that Verizon Wireless DC customers sent/received 2.9 million SMS messages between 10am and pm yesterday. Despite the preparation, users on several major carriers reported dropped calls and other disconnects.
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