In what is perhaps the largest study of Internet traffic's temporal characteristics, the folks at Arbor have used data from the Internet Observatory and analyzed weekday application traffic flowing through 110 geographically diverse Internet service providers. What they've found is somewhat surprising: US Internet traffic is at its peak at 11pm EDT, and it stays relatively high until 3am in the morning.
Once upon a time, Internet traffic peaked somewhere around 8 AM, when most people come to work. But people are obviously surfing just as much, or even more, from their homes.
Arbor's analysis shows what these late night surfers like to do online. Online gaming is tough to do at work or at school, so this type of traffic grows by more than 60% after 2pm and peaks between 8pm and 11pm EDT on weekdays. Instant messaging traffic is quite constant throughout the day, but it only starts dropping somewhere around midnight. When it comes to watching videos, surfers also tend to do it all day, but they do it even more towards the evening, peaking at midnight.
To get some idea of what types of videos these users are watching, Arbor's analysts have compared which hosting companies' traffic increases in the evening, and - sure enough - the traffic of companies hosting adult content have a large jump in traffic between 10pm and 1am EDT.
The results of the study, while interesting, are far from conclusive. A significant portion of US population lives on Eastern time, but you also have to take into account Central and Pacific time. Furthermore, all the traffic numbers in the study come from this July, and in the summer online traffic patterns are different than in other parts of the year. However, Arbor plans a follow-up to the study based on traffic data in other seasons, together with a close analysis of some of the hosting providers with strong nighttime traffic.