Interoute increases CERN’s bandwidth capacity for the ‘big bang’ Day - 19 Sep 08

London, 19^th Sept - Last week, the first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN ¹⁾ was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world's most powerful particle accelerator. In anticipation of a huge surge in Internet traffic on the day, CERN asked Interoute to provide additional network capacity. On September 10^th, usage of the CERN website peaked from the usual 30Mbps (measure of bandwidth) to 350Mbps – a staggering increase of 1066 per cent.

Interoute, the owner operator of Europe's most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, increased bandwidth to CERN’s website by a factor 6 for the period surrounding the test to support this new online audience.

Gareth Williams, Interoute’s CEO, said: “This historic event was closely followed by people the world over. CERN not only had a boom in network connectivity to power the event itself, but also a spike in traffic at the CERN site in response to global demand for real-time updates. Major events are now fully dependent on the Internet to satisfy audience demand, and companies need to be able to accommodate surges in interest. Interoute can provision large chunks of IP on demand for its customers – delivering 10Gbps of capacity in just 10 days.” 

Please see below a graph showing the peak in traffic to the CERN website on the day of the first LHC beam (10^th Sept) and images of CERN LHC. High-res versions of these images can be downloaded quickly and easily by clicking on the images or the corresponding links below.

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