COVID-19 Impact – Openreach’s Network Traffic by UK Region UPDATE

Openreach (BT) has kindly furnished ISPreview.co.uk with some up-to-date data that shows the change in their weekly network traffic (Ethernet, broadband etc.) by each region of the United Kingdom due to the impact of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) crisis. London saw the biggest jump (28.58%) to 112.37 PetaBytes.

Since most adults and children are now stuck at home during the lockdown then much of the recorded increase relates to daytime network traffic, while during the evenings the operator noted that “network traffic remains pretty much unchanged … and still well below the more extreme peaks we experienced just before Christmas, when Amazon live streamed multiple Premier League matches at the same time.”

The findings are roughly consistent with what we’ve seen all though the current crisis. We should add, in case it wasn’t already obvious, that Openreach are of course one of the main connectivity suppliers for various major data links, hundreds of fixed line broadband ISPs and mobile network operators etc.

Otherwise the figures below represent weekly totals (w/c = week commencing from Monday onwards) in PetaBytes of data. The original source data also included information for the week commencing 13th April 2020 but those figures were almost identical to 20th April period and so we’ve only used the most recent week.

The 24th February was picked because it’s fairly representative of the pre-COVID-19 picture, which began to really have an impact through March until we settled into the new normal. Otherwise Openreach said they’ve had no trouble coping with the extra load: “We’re not experiencing any issues and we don’t anticipate any,” said the operator.

UPDATE 30th April 2020

Openreach has kindly provided us with the data for Northern Ireland, which we’ve added above.