Sky Broadband See Rise in UK Christmas and New Year Data Traffic

Customers of UK ISP Sky Broadband saw increased internet data consumption during the festive period this year, with data downloads on Christmas Day rising by 9.52% to 115PB (PetaBytes), which is up from 105PB last year. But bigger increases were reported across the rest of the festive season.

As we’ve said before, demand for data is constantly rising and home broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP. But overall, the increases seen during 2022 so far have been fairly small to modest, and not especially remarkable (examples here and here). The same appears to be true for Sky, albeit with the odd exception.

For example, data supplied by Sky Broadband to ISPreview.co.uk revealed that Boxing Day was much busier in 2022 (131 PB) than 2021 (111 PB), which equates to an increase of 18.02%. On the flip side, the traffic increase seen on New Year’s Day in 2022 (121 PB) vs 2021 (109 PB) – a rise of 11.01% – was more akin to the trend seen on Christmas Day.

But overall, usage has increase, which is what we’d expect. Both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day tend to show a more subdued increase as most of us are either spending more time with family (i.e. less on our devices / computers) or, in the case of New Year’s Day, resting in recovery following the prior night.