Over the last school year, Cybera has connected a large number of K-12 and post-secondary institutions to our research, peering, and transit networks. With the 2024-25 school year finished, it’s a great opportunity to look at our traffic patterns and statistics.
SuperNet
The majority of our members connect to us through the Alberta SuperNet. Cybera wouldn’t be able to reach as many of our members as we do without this foundational infrastructure in our province.
Our network team recently completed a multi-year expansion of our SuperNet connectivity, which you can read about here. Now, with a full school year of traffic metrics recorded, we can take a look at how much data is moving over this part of our network.
We’ll start by looking at our Calgary and Edmonton SuperNet connections combined:
Throughout September and June, you can see the peaks and valleys of network activity. There’s the usual slowdown during winter break, and increased activity towards the end of the year.
Our SuperNet traffic peaked at around 43.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) twice during the school year: once in October and once in June.
The total data transferred during this last school year over the SuperNet was 6.35 petabytes (PB). That’s equivalent to sending 2.1 billion high-res JPEG photos.
Now let’s take a look at Calgary specifically:
Traffic generally follows the same pattern, with some slight variations, such as a smaller amount of traffic at certain times.
We hit a max transfer of 26.9 Gbps in October, and transferred a total of 3.44 PB of data.
Now, Edmonton:
The most notable difference here is the increased amount of traffic during May and June, compared to Calgary. During that time, we hit a max transfer rate of 19.6 Gbps. A total of 2.91 PB was transferred over the school year.
The SuperNet traffic represents what we consider to be the traffic coming into our member institutions from the outside world. The majority of our members connect to us over the SuperNet.
Let’s take a look at the traffic that our members are pulling in.
Research Traffic
The research network is the foundational network for Cybera, helping to connect students, researchers, laboratories, and space agencies in Alberta to the world. This is the network used by the larger post-secondary institutions in the province, including the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, and Lethbridge.
One thing that stands out from this past year is that we had almost as much traffic going out to the world as we had coming in from the world. We peaked at 7.07 Gbps coming in and 6.54 Gbps going out. In total, we transferred 2.97 PB of data.
Peering Traffic
Our Peering network is the most popular network service at Cybera. It helps create fast, low-latency connections to major content providers such as Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Amazon, and more.
Just looking at the network graphic, you can tell: that’s a lot of traffic.
We saw a peak transfer rate of 75.5 Gbps in October, and came close to that at several other points during the year. We’re creeping up on a full 100 Gbps of traffic here, which is exciting to see. (For context, that’s equivalent to transmitting six full HD movies every second).
Recall that we also saw the highest amount of SuperNet traffic that same month. These kinds of correlations help us understand the overall traffic flow from our members, the busiest times of the year for them, and the services they depend on the most.
In total, we transferred 70.7 PB of data over our Peering network. That really is a lot of traffic.
Transit
Generally, anything that doesn’t go over our research and Peering networks “falls through” to our transit network, which covers the remaining internet connections needed by our members.
An interesting trend we see is that transit increased towards the end of the school year, matching that same increase we saw with our SuperNet traffic. But we do not see that same increase in our Peering traffic. This tells us that our members were connecting to sites and services that fall outside of the usual Google, Microsoft, and Amazon-based services at the end of the year. This is something we’ve made an internal note of to research more, which could possibly help us provide a better connection to these “other” services for our members in the future.
On the transit network, we hit a max transfer rate of 16 Gbps, and transferred a total of 9.71 PB over the school year.
Summary
Our network team has had a great year. We finished our SuperNet expansion, saw it in action, and provided our members a fast, stable connection to our research, Peering, and transit network services.
In total, we transferred 6.35 PB of data over the SuperNet and 83 PB of data across our research, Peering, and transit networks. Let’s see if we can beat that next year!
| Network | Max transmit rate | Total data transferred |
| SuperNet | 43.5Gbps | 6.35PB |
| Research | 7.07Gbps | 2.97PB |
| Peering | 75.5Gbps | 70.7PB |
| Transit | 16Gbps | 9.71PB |