When the World Cup Moved to YouTube: 416 Gbps and the Limits of Local Delivery in Brazil#

Renato Ornelas – OpenX (Brazil)

• Why: Not the PM's usual beat, but a rare, complete dataset of an entire nation's traffic arriving over one CDN with no delivery infrastructure of its own — hard numbers on cache ceilings, PNI saturation, and event-driven capacity.
• What: 34 match nights measured at OpenX (AS263444, 60+ downstream ASNs, 1–3M broadband subscribers): 18.4 PB of Google traffic; 416 Gbps peak; 12 PB above football-free baselines. At the peak, embedded cache pinned at its 79 Gbps ceiling and one PNI site saturated at 2×100G — so 40% of delivered traffic (165 of 409 Gbps) arrived over international transit from North America and Europe. Kickoff hour predicted peaks better than audience size (21.1M devices at 2pm Monday → 207 Gbps; 18.5M at 5pm Sunday → 391 Gbps). The half-time signature: Google sheds 128 Gbps in ten minutes while Meta jumps and Netflix stays flat — three CDNs moving three directions inside fifteen minutes.
• How: Five-minute flow telemetry (Kentik) over 16-hour nightly windows, with a per-night appendix chart marking half-time, extra time, and shootouts.
• Where applicable: Brazil-specific vantage (single-CDN delivery, one wholesale operator) — but the transferable lessons are explicit: size for the event not the busy hour; local-delivery ceilings are ones you don't control; and measure it yourself, because flow data at five-minute resolution showed everything.