Should Apple have released its Software Updates in Europe?

Mar 26, 2020

As days passed since Apple announced the release of its macOS 10.15.4, iOS and iPadOS 13.4 updates, I begin wondering if it should have. And since I knew it would have, I wondered what the impact on web traffic would have been.
In Europe, as a consequence of the spread of the Coronavirus disease (COVID19), many workers are working from home; I myself am working from home these days, connected via VPN to our company server. Moreover, teachers are trying to keep schooling alive by streaming video-lessons to students at home, by sending them material to work on and asking the class to send back homework as they are done.
As the networks are seing an important surge of traffic, european institutions have asked major video-on-demand providers to lower the quality of their strams to accomodate the need for free bandwidth, rightfully establishing a priority of needs. All this said, I began wondering: should Apple release its software updates via the internet now?

Some numbers

Since I haven't found any data on the last few days of network usage, I looked at past iOS/macOS releases to get some perspective.
Back in October 2011, iOS 5 caused a 20% increase of web traffic when released, a spike that actually had a severe hit on Apple's servers that were effectively failing half of the requests.
A similar effect had the release of iOS 7 a couple of years later:

At one unnamed North American fixed Internet provider, "Apple Updates immediately became almost 20 percent of total network traffic and continued to stay above 15 percent of total traffic into the evening peak hours,"

iOS 8 apparently had an even higher impact on Network Traffic, with some sources indicating a 50% increase of traffic as the software update was released.

All this said, what's the big picture of web traffic? Who are the big players as per bandwidth usage today?
Sandvine has issued a detailed report towards the end of last year analyzing web traffic.
As some may have expected, over 60% of web traffic is devoted to video streaming. 60%.
From here, it is clear the need of addressing this web usage first of all to free some bandwidth for workers and students at home, especially since the flow of data for increasingly High Quality video can scale up quite fast, starting from 1.4GB of data for a Standard Definition movie, going to 6GB for its HD version and sky rocketing to respectively 54GB and a whopping 162GB for 4k and 8k video streams.
But what's Apple's share in this panorama?
Always according to Sandvine's report, all Apple related traffic, including iTunes, iCloud, Apple Software Update, FaceTime, Apple Music, Apple.com, iCloud Photo Stream and the Mac App Store account for a mere 4% of global traffic.

What can I do?

As we have established, maybe OS updates aren't the big bandwidth monster I imagined. Nonetheless, if you are worried or just want to play your part, there are few things I think we can do to help keeping the line free, some precautions we can use this and next times.

First: let the device choose when it is time to download the update. As some might have noticed, Apple devices rarely rush to download the latest software update and this I believe is a strategy the company uses to also avoid stressing their servers. So, let's wait for our iPhones, Mac and iPads to choose when to download and install the next update instead of being collectively downloading GB of data at the same time.

Second: download stuff at night. While this may seem a bit silly in a worldwide web that runs 24h a day, using your data at night might help reduce the web traffic in your local network from peak hours: the same network your neighbors use, the same peak hours people need for working and studying remotely.

Third: if you have the possibility, enable macOS local caching. Previously available only for macOS Server, but recently available on all macs, local caching allows to store (cache) some content on a mac on the local network and source it from there if and when needed. This applies to iOS and macOS updates, but also to iCloud files, iTunesU videos and even high quality Siri voices.

Final words

Let's see if next days will give us a glimpse of what impact the release of a slew of OS updates on Tuesday had on Internet web traffic.
In the meantime, lets keep in mind that, now more than ever, our actions can have a significant impact on other people; from something as big as staying inside to protect the others, not clog hospitals and stop the spread of this pandemic, to something as small as waiting to update our Apple devices.

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