The Broadband Inauguration

By Brad

Yesterday’s swearing in of Barack Obama as America’s 44th president proved to be a big day for online media. How big? As the New York Times reports:

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

CNN alone delivered over 21 million video streams of the event over the course of nine hours—17 million more than on Election Day. But as the Times story notes, such a flood of traffic wasn’t without hiccups. The massive amount of video data led to a number of people being unable to participate in the event, a problem that…

...may have been more a result of the limited Internet capacity coming to offices and houses, rather than a lack of overall bandwidth from the media companies, according to Mr. Woodcock. The United States continues to suffer from less-than-robust bandwidth, which Mr. Woodcock attributes to inadequate government attention and limited competition between Internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast. President Obama, in fact, mentioned the issue in the very speech that people were trying to watch.

“We’ve had eight years of stagnation and need to get to work solving problems like this,” Mr. Woodcock said.

The market for online media is growing rapidly. Now the infrastructure for delivering that media needs to catch up.