Yota network readiness for the New Year holidays

New Year's holidays - a special period. At this time, the country walks and rests amicably, spending money without restraint on pyrotechnics and all sorts of goodies, including the ingredients for Olivier. Sales of various goods and services fly up, people visit each other, and on New Year's Eve they congratulate all their relatives and friends. Including, through mobile phones. And on the eve of the New Year, we decided to talk about how the load on our network changes at the turn of the calendar shift, and how we are preparing for it.

“My own country is wide” is not a boast, but a statement of fact. Russia is so large that our territory is divided into 11 time zones, this is no longer in any country in the world. And the first in the New Year are regions living in Kamchatka time. And then there is a wave of new years in the country, so that by the time the European part of Russia begins to count the chiming clock, Kamchatka, tired, has been sleeping for a long time in a strong morning sleep.

On normal days, the network load indicator (TPS - transactions per second, the number of voice calls per unit of time) is about 600,000 connections every second (of which 53% are outgoing connections, 47% are incoming).
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Happy New Year people begin to congratulate each other in advance. Someone fears that they will not be able to call later, someone does not want to be distracted later, someone just can not wait to congratulate. Therefore, the load on the network begins to increase from about 22:00. By 23:00, it reaches its peak and stays at this level for about two hours, after which the decline in customer activity begins. During the peak period, the number of voice calls is sometimes increased 10 times, SMS - up to 15 times. And soon after 1:30, customer activity quickly drops to almost zero: after all, you must pay tribute to the festive table, go for a walk or visit.



On New Year's Eve, the number of voice connections increases by 80-100%, the number of sent SMS increases by 300-400%. At the same time, it is curious that the volume of mobile traffic during the New Year holidays even decreases somewhat. Moreover, the consumption of mobile traffic remains low throughout the New Year holidays. And this is probably correct - these days it is better to pay attention to family and friends, and not to gadgets. As for the content itself, thanks to the unlimited Internet for our users, the overwhelming majority is accounted for by streaming video: movies, series, online broadcasts, videos.

So, after 1:30, people almost stop calling and writing SMS to each other. Someone walks to the full extent until the morning, someone drinks champagne, eats a salad and goes to sleep. In the morning, the slow growth of the load on the network begins again, and by 9-10 o'clock the indicators reach the level of the day off. On this New Year's Eve, we expect a significant increase in the traffic of instant messengers.

It is obvious that the maximum load in the New Year period falls on systems serving the user in real time. Therefore, various methods of optimization are used to save their resources. For example, charging of knowingly free calls is temporarily disabled (within the Yota network, etc.). Their data is cached and sent to the billing system with a delay, rather than in real time.

The main preparation for the New Year is to expand the number of voice connections. The required increase is calculated based on the current value of the standard load and the predicted value for the New Year's Eve. At the same time, unlike other mobile operators, whose subscriber base has long stabilized, after the New Year holidays we do not refuse these additional capacities, since the number of our customers is constantly growing. And the expansion of the number of voice connections will not be superfluous. First of all, zonal connections (calls to local landline numbers) and MG / IL calls (long-distance / international) are extended, through which we have calls to other operators, with the exception of MegaFon.

If before there was a certain fashion - to congratulate each other at 00.00 - in recent years, users begin to send congratulations before 00.00. Traffic on January 1, commensurate with the load on a normal day off. Then, during the New Year holidays, there has traditionally been a slight decrease in customer activity - by about 30% compared with the usual weekend.

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We wish you to actively meet the year 2016, all of a sudden the old omen - both you will meet and you will spend it - does not exist just like that!
Happy you!