UPD2 England vs Wales Euro 2016 Match Starts UK Internet Traffic Surge

The UEFA Euro 2016 football match between England and Wales this afternoon, which kicked off at 2pm and occurred during working hours, triggered a 2 hour long surge of Internet traffic as office staff moved to keep a sly eye on proceedings by using video streaming services like iPlayer (BBC).

The previous England game against Russia produced almost no impact upon UK Internet traffic, not least because it occurred outside of working hours and that meant people could sit down in front of a traditional TV in order to enjoy the event.

However it’s always a different story when the national team play during working hours and on this occasion the UK had two teams playing against each other, which no doubt pushed the numbers up higher than usual. The first to report is LONAP (via AAISP) and you can clearly see the huge spike from 2pm to 4pm at the end.

Elsewhere the Leeds Internet Exchange (IXLeeds) reported that they delivered twice the usual weekday load (5Gbit) to Northern ISPs during the match and business ISP Timico noted that football viewing built up to 2.3Gbps (Gigabits per second) of streaming after half-time, which was spread across small / large offices and homes. Other ISPs have also reported a similar surge.

The match also occurred at the same time as news broke that MP Jo Cox had tragically lost her life after being shot and stabbed during an attack in Birstall, which may have also played a part in today’s traffic spike 🙁 .

UPDATE 17th June 2016 (7am)

Mobile operator EE claims to have seen the most data traffic ever on its 3G and 4G network yesterday, as England and Wales fans watched the match on their mobile devices. When Daniel Sturridge scored the winner, EE’s network data traffic was 50% higher than its last peak during Tim Cahill’s World Cup goal in 2014.

UPDATE 18th June 2016

The BBC reports that 11.8 million unique daily visitors hit their UK sport website on match day, which is up from the last record of 10.2 million (final day of the 2015-16 Premier League). Meanwhile 2.3 million were watching a video stream of the match online via the BBC’s site, which is double the previous record.

Elsewhere we’ve seen UK ISP Elite give a report on their Internet traffic from the event and suffice to say, it’s extreme.