The Takeaway: No, Windows 10's roll-out won't break the Internet
"Windows 10 ... will easily be the largest day/week of traffic ever on the Internet," said Dan Rayburn, a Frost & Sullivan analyst who weighed in Monday on the Web traffic snarl on his StreamingMediaBlog.com. "...Windows 10 is going to create some serious havoc with regards to the user experience. Expect to see some download times in the days, not hours, especially if any other content owners happen to have larger-than-expected traffic at the same time."
In short: "Quality of service for downloads could deteriorate really quickly and remain poor for days, if not longer," Rayburn said.
To try and avoid problems, Microsoft is stretching out the Windows 10 release. Here's how that works:
Although the expected slowdown of Windows 10 downloads might not be obvious to most users because the upgrade is being delivered in the background -- the congestion means it'll take longer to deliver the OS to all of the users who want it.
Said Rayburn: "I've never used the term 'break the Internet' because most of the time people say that, they are simply overhyping an event on the Web. But with the volume of downloads that Microsoft is expecting and the capacity they have already reserved to deliver the software, the Internet is in for some real performance problems this week."
With reports by Gregg Keizer at Computerworld.