Virgin Media UK Reveal XMas 2025 and New Year 2026 Broadband Traffic
Internet provider Virgin Media (O2) has kindly furnished ISPreview with some general traffic stats from their fixed broadband network over the festive period, which for example reveals that Christmas Day internet traffic was up 11% on last year (broadly in line with traffic growth generally). But compared to an average Thursday in 2025, traffic was up by 22%.
In terms of New Year’s Eve, Virgin Media reported that fixed broadband traffic was up 10% from last year and that’s also 12% higher than the average Wednesday in 2025. Sadly, the provider wasn’t yet able to reveal any data on mobile (4G, 5G) traffic over the same period.
The above stats come shortly after VMO2 revealed how they’d seen an 8% rise in broadband usage (down slightly from a rise of 8.1% in 2024) and an 18% rise in mobile traffic through the past year (up from 9%) – driven by growing use of AI, live sports streaming and major game releases (here); we also got some other network insights just a few days after that (here).
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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.
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Glad to help, I transferred around 10TB over that period
The medal’s in the post.
“and an 18% rise in mobile traffic through the past year (up from 9%)
Their excuse for this I guarantee is marketing bs and actually people on Volt Packages who have had issues with service as a known fault since Nov 27 that keeps getting pushed back every week with the new estimate Jan 7 which no doubt will be sent straight back to another week of waiting
Seasons greetings to all websites which function without needing JavaScript to be enabled. (Like ISP review mostly does). The reduction in traffic demand on slow circuits is HUGE. Sometimes it feels like Internet browsing is 80% JavaScript, 15% adverts, and 5% what you wanted.
NoScript plus uBlock origin should sort things.
Sorry to be a pain in the arse, but I have no problem with SPs providing numbers on internal traffic (would love to know how they measured this traffic), but as per my previous comments on the measurement of Internet traffic i.e. bits in/out of an SP into the Internet is currently meaningless. The only group who are doing real work on this are the IETF with RFC 9522 and see https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9522/
Sorry to also be a pain in the arse but please refer back to my earlier comment. When ISPs talk abour ‘broadband traffic’ they measure load at their L2TP Network Servers (LNS) for those using PPP (Point to Point Protocol), depending on needs wholesale networks and others may measure at their Broadband Remote Access Servers (BRAS), while those using IP over Ethernet (IPoE) measure at Broadband Network Gateways (BNG), if they’re including it in the numbers the edge routers for those customers with leased lines and direct IP, and in the case of Virgin Media at the cable equivalent of edge routers, the Cable Modem Termination Systems (CMTS) that terminate the vast majority of their customer base.
They can record traffic at the CMTS among other ways via the standardised Internet Protocol Detail Record (IPDR).
They measure in these places to ensure they capture all customer traffic to any on-net Content Delivery Network caches.
Due to the cost matrix for most ISPs getting bits from the customer’s home to their LNS/BNG is by far the most expensive part of the journey per Mbps per month. Even those using their own networks getting traffic to/from BNGs is the costly part: backhaul costs more per Mbps per month than the core network, transit or peering.
Bits into and out of an SP, in theory easy, sum of the utilisation on all the links between their ASN(s) and everything else. To avoid congestion on those links if other networks have multiple paths to theirs they modify their advertisements to influence the inbound traffic as that’s how BGP works.
https://networklessons.com/bgp/bgp-attributes-and-path-selection
Netflow is very often used to obtain more information on traffic flows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetFlow
Once ISP networks scale the combination of communication between machines and eyeballs and between machines and machines makes it complicated but if they’re really curious a combination of offline analysis of NetFlow telemetry, extensive deduplication and adding together of various measurement points can give a single number, though for obvious reasons they’re more interested operationally in data on a flow, node and link basis.
Polish Poler
Thank you for the feedback. I will bring your comments into my next version of Humpty Dumpty.
Usage is up 11%, but suggest a price rise of half that (5.5% ) to cover the increased cost of providing that service and you listen to people moan…
Usage being up doesn’t imply that costs are up. For all we know, the peak utilisation went from 33% to 35%, meaning that no actually upgrades are needed.