When Apple finally released iOS 8 to customers last night, it was a safe bet that there would be plenty of early adopters, and now early traffic figures from one of the UK's largest broadband suppliers give us some indication of just how many people have already made the switch.
According to Virgin Media, record numbers of iPhone and iPad owners were downloading the iOS 8 update - causing a 10% increase in peak download traffic and resulting in the busiest ever day on the Virgin network. Based on these early figures, the traffic increase points to Apple's 920MB update being downloaded a potential 600,000 times in six hours.
"From what we’ve seen so far, the release of iOS 8 has driven more internet traffic than previous updates, with increased demand likely to last until the weekend," Martin Groundsell, Virgin Media's Head of Broadband Access, said. "Even though the iOS 8 release has generated the biggest download day so far, our fastest customers have been downloading iOS 8 in as little as 61 seconds at peak times with no major problems reported."
iOS 8 has only been available for a little under 24 hours, but it has already started making an impact in central London. Virgin also revealed that over 13% of Apple devices connecting to its London Underground Wi-Fi network were already running iOS 8.
North American ISPs were also reporting up to 3Tbps network utilisation when the iOS 8 update dropped yesterday. We'll have to wait until the end of the month to know for sure, but September is looking like it could be a record-breaker.
Even without Apple's huge influence on traffic, September was already shaping up to be one of the busiest months of the year for broadband networks. According to the Streaming Media blog, the first week of the month saw no less than 14 major events or launches that were expected to cause spikes in internet use. Several were gaming related, with Bungie's Destiny and a demo of EA's FIFA 15 both contributing to the surge.
