Apple Relied on Its Own Network for Part of the iOS 8 Upgrade - Digits - WSJ

I saw "About 36 hours remaining" when I tried to upgrade to iOS 8 on my iPad Wednesday night, but I have a hunch that was more of a Verizon issue than an Apple CDN problem

"The roll-out of Apple’s new mobile-operating system Wednesday was the first time the company used its proprietary data distribution infrastructure, also called a content-delivery network, for such a large-scale deployment.

And it was a massive challenge at that. At one point, iOS 8 downloads chewed up more than 3 terabits of bandwidth each second, according to data from Internet researcher DeepField. A terabit is a massive amount of data to carry in a second—enough to hold more than 25 high-definition movies."

Apple Relied on Its Own Network for Part of the iOS 8 Upgrade - Digits - WSJ