Telstra Free Data Day and Latency

Telstra Free Data Day and Latency

Yesterday, Sunday April 3, 2016 was Telstra’s ‘Free Data Day’ after there was a network connectivity problem for their customers in March. It was a ‘compensation day’ for the outage.

It gave us a view as to what happens to latency when a network is under a lot of load.

The graphs below latency graphs of one of our Bonded Hybrid solutions (we bond and ADSL service with a 4G service). See it here: https://youtu.be/5PszOe7YtUA

The charts show the latency of both the ADSL service (thick yellow line) and the 4G service (thick blue line).

This first chart was taken on Saturday April 2 (the day before the Free Data Day). The latency on the ADSL service (yellow) is very stable as you would expect. The 4G service (blue), while not as stable as the ADSL, is what we generally see throughout a normal day.

On Sunday April 3, the Free Data Day started at midnight and continued for 24 hours. You can see the effect on the following chart.

Looking at the graph below, you can see the latency on the ADSL remains stable and constant.

The blue line shows the 4G latency really taking off around 8:00am and winding right up to 400ms through to about 11:30pm when the Free Data Day was ending.

This massive jump in latency is the result of the network under significant load!