Broadband ISP TalkTalk Breaks Own UK Internet Traffic Record
Budget broadband ISP TalkTalk has reported that last week’s internet data traffic record of 6.85Tbps (Terabits per second), which was set on 10th Nov (here), has been broken again on Saturday 14th November 2020, when they hit a new peak of 6.94Tbps.
There were many reasons behind it this time – not just the continued restrictions caused by COVID19 or this week’s new Xbox consoles and ‘Call of Duty’ video game releases. Other reasons were the bad weather across much of the UK and the Amazon prime coverage of the rugby internationals.
Advertisement
We should remind readers that demand for data is constantly rising and so new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP (usage typically grows by 30%+ each year) but, every once in a while, it’s interesting to look at specific events like this one, especially when they come so soon after the first.
Most ISPs also employ Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to help manage the load from such events, which caches common content closer to end-users (i.e. improves performance without network strain) and lowers their impact on external links.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Housing Landlords Still View Cost as Main Barrier to Full Fibre
London ISP Community Fibre Offers 800Mbps Broadband for £30 »
Idle observation: averaged over their entire customer base, that’s about 1.65 Mbit/s/customer.
Wot you think all 4.22 million TT customers were simultanously using the internet? I find that extremely hard to believe sir.
That is not what Alex was saying though Pip. The average usage per customer at peak times is a very useful yardstick (perhaps we should say metrestick these days?!) as it feeds into capacity planning.
To give a comparison, our micro FWA ISP business currently has around 350 customers and our average usage at peak times is generally around 1.4 Mbps/customer at the moment. I have always found it fascinating (probably should get out more!!) that our average peak usage is not so different from the big boys.
Hey Mark, have you been enjoying the new cod too?
I hear it’s been wreaking haddock 😉
THEY NEED TO INVEST IN MORE BANDWIDTH, THE NETWORK IS OVER SUBSCRIBED
Vote with your feet
TT speeds are fine here
https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/b47ef08d-fa52-4555-a962-c55599ca8c0b
No capacity issues here either.
https://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/1601553403253154355