Record Netflix UK Internet Traffic Hits TalkTalk’s Broadband Network

Internet providers across the United Kingdom saw a surge in data traffic on Sunday evening as Netflix, the online movie and TV streaming giant, released all 13 episodes of the latest ‘House of Cards‘ series at once. Sunday is always the busiest day of the week for related traffic on TalkTalk, but this one was a record breaker.

The ISP states that at 9.30pm on Sunday evening they saw Netflix usage on their broadband platform increase to a record breaking 322Gbps (Gigabits per second), which apparently represented a fifth of the total data traffic passing through their network.

According to the ISPs Head of Network Operations, Martin North, the surge did not create any bandwidth shortages. “This is because popular and bandwidth-hungry services like Netflix are delivered over Content Delivery Networks, dedicated servers placed strategically throughout the network,” said North.

It’s interesting to note the growth of data traffic in TalkTalk’s network, which is also reflected by other ISPs. Back in January 2014 TalkTalk recorded a peak of 900Gbps and this had jumped to 1.38Tbps (Terabits per second) by early December 2014. Elsewhere Sky Broadband saw their traffic double last year to peak at 2Tbps on Christmas Day 2014 (note: Sky has 1.2 million more customers than TalkTalk).