David Meyer

ZDNet.co.uk

Dave Tomlinson, from the ISP’s product team, wrote a blog on Monday saying that PlusNet’s remote-access traffic doubled, with a slight increase in standard HTTP traffic as well. He classified “remote access traffic” as including VPN applications, remote desktop, SSH, VNC and the like.

“This is something we always have on our radar, and if necessary, we can make changes on the fly to our traffic management systems to be able to cope with higher than normal levels of certain types of traffic like this,” Tomlinson wrote. “Fortunately, today we’ve only had to make a couple of small tweaks but we will be monitoring both the weather and traffic on the network very closely while there’s still snow in case we need to switch the configuration on the traffic management systems.”

Mobile networks were also strained, with Orange reporting what it called “the biggest Monday in mobile for years”.

“We have seen an uplift in usage across the entire network,” the operator said in a statement. “The biggest spike for calls and texts was in the morning between 7am and 8.30am when people were contacting their work to say they couldn’t make it in. Throughout the day, the mobile data network has seen a considerable uplift with people logging on from home to keep up to speed with work. Wi-Fi usage is also up.”

A spokesperson for Vodafone told ZDNet UK on Tuesday that the operator had seen “busy pockets”, particularly in the London area, but no actual technical problems. The spokesperson said that, between 7am and midday, Vodafone’s network had handled 50 percent more voice calls, 58 percent more texts and 14 percent more mobile broadband traffic than that seen on a normal Monday morning. Between 7am and 8am, Vodafone’s MMS traffic increased by 800 percent, as its customers sent picture messages of snow.

Travel websites took a hit, with the Journey Planner facility on Transport for London’s (TfL) site operating slowly for patches of Monday morning, as hordes of commuters tried to find out whether their trains and tubes were running. South West Trains‘ website also experienced difficulties and, on Tuesday morning, the National Rail Enquiries site was still running a cut-down homepage to deal with the number of commuters trying to catch up with the availability of services.

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