BT Sees its UK Broadband ISP Traffic Peak at 13 Terabits in March 2019

Customers of BT’s (EE) retail fixed line broadband ISP business (around 9.4 million of them) hit a new record level of internet data traffic after the network peaked at around 13Tbps (Terabits per second) in March, which is up from 10.4Tbps at roughly the same time last year. By comparison their mobile broadband network hit 0.4Tbps.

By contrast the operator’s forecast suggests that their fixed line network could reach the dizzying heights of c.50Tbps peak data traffic in just five years’ time and on their mobile network this is predicted to reach 1.5Tbps. The take-up of G.fast and Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based “ultrafast broadband” technologies on their fixed line network, and adoption of 5G on mobile, is going to be a key driver.

The primary source of most consumer internet traffic is of course still online video / TV streaming content (iPlayer, Netflix, Amazon, BT TV, NOW TV, YouTube etc.), although the impact of this does vary. As video quality improves (e.g. HD to 4K consumption) then often so too does the underlying compression technology (video codecs), which can mitigate some of the increase by shrinking higher quality streams down to ever smaller sizes.

The above figures were actually published at the end of last month as part of BT’s technology briefing (here), which among other things also included a nicely simplified overview of their on-going work toward a more converged all-IP and cloud based network core by 2022. We’ve included the diagram below as it’s interesting.