Yesterdays crucial 2010 Fifa World Cup match between England and Slovenia, which occurred during working hours and also clashed with the Wimbledon Tennis tournament, saw broadband internet traffic in the UK climb to record breaking levels as office workers across the country logged on to stream live video of the match.

Akamai's global content delivery network, which delivers 20% of world internet traffic, saw the UK account for just over 22% of all usage across its servers. Business ISP Timico saw streaming traffic rise up by 357%. PlusNet also witnessed an extra 4.5Gbps of iPlayer traffic from the football.

Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses, also released statistics showing that network traffic from its 3,500 business customers hit an all time record of double normal levels during England’s game.


The increase in traffic can be largely attributable to workers watching the game through online sites like the BBC iPlayer service; a streamed football match on a single computer can consume around 750MB (MegaBytes').


Another factor that boosted bandwidth consumption was extra traffic being generated around the match as employees shared the experience with friends, family and colleagues on social networking sites like Twitter. Twitter itself was offline for most of the match due to heavy load.

Similarly many business and consumer broadband ISP connections experienced high latency and slow speeds during the game, which caused a few slowdowns on the iPlayer service. The huge traffic flow even forced PlusNet to switch its network into a "Plan B (high demand operation)".


Suffice to say that the picture described above was, so far as we can tell, repeated across multiple UK ISP networks and has set the bar fairly high so far as record breaking internet traffic goes. Oh yes and one other thing, just a tiny point, England won :cheese: !

UPDATE 7:30am

Communications provider Easynet Connect reports that web traffic jumped 226% during the match compared with today's average download rate. Hull operator KC ( Karoo ) also witnessed a 31% jump in web traffic. The BBC noted how early figures suggest the total number of concurrent iPlayer streams peaked at 800,000.. ouch.

UPDATE 1:04pm

The England World Cup 2010 victory over Slovenia created an increase in daytime online traffic of 36%, according to analysis of internet use by Eclipse Internet, an ISP for SME’s and home users. Demon Internet recorded a whopping 55% increase in internet usage across its network too.

Hopefully that's the last of the press releases on this :cheese: .