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Imagine if at 9pm one Thursday evening there was a sudden 20 percent surge in demand on the electricity network. At the very least there would be a few households reaching for candles and electric torches.

Yet that's exactly what happened to the national internet network last week when a software update to Fortnite, the popular computer fighting game, landed.

The network company Chorus saw a 20 percent spike in traffic yet nothing untoward happened. There were no reported outages. If anyone noticed their fixed-line connection slowing, it wasn't serious enough to be public news.

Robust, resilient, reliable

Our internet network took the surge in its stride. That's a measure of how far we have come. It's robust, resilient, reliable: all the R-words.

And if you don't think this is a big deal, take a look across the Tasman where Optus efforts to stream the 2018 World Cup strained telecommunications infrastructure.

Chorus has become used to seeing spikes. Every month or so it reports a new, higher peak as network traffic continues to rise. From the consumer point of view this has all happened in the background with no obvious side-effects.

The normal pattern on the network is for data traffic to hit a peak at around 9pm when the number of people streaming TV content reaches a daily maximum.

Last Thursday the Fortnite version five patch became available at about 8pm. This is just as the daily streaming traffic rises towards its crescendo. At the 9pm peak data traffic was 20 percent higher than normal.

Fortnite on fibre

Chorus says the amount of extra traffic at that time means as many as 30,000 New Zealander gamers were downloading the Fortnite patch at the same time.

As anyone who experience mobile network downloads of, say, an iOS software update for the Apple iPhone earlier this decade will remember, big software updates can clog networks. And yet that didn't happen.

Network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers says Chorus has never seen a spike like that before. He says Fortnite is a great example of how fibre internet can support gamers.

There needs to be considerable headroom for any network to be able to take a 20 percent spike without blinking.

Disclosure: Chorus didn't pay me or ask me to write this story. While I am paid to edit the company's magazine I'd have written this story the same way regardless.

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