Virgin Media UK Network Carries 4.2 Petabytes of Broadband Data Daily

Cable operator Virgin Media has revealed that its national UK telecoms network, which is home to 4.4 Million residential broadband ISP subscribers, carried a daily average of 4.2 Petabytes of data during Q1-2012 (4.2 million billion bytes). The volume of data consumption has thus increased by nearly a third in the 6 months from Q3 2011.

The figure allegedly equates to about 765 billion individual bits of data being transferred every second during peak times (between 6.00pm and 10.00pm weeknights). As with most modern internet networks the biggest single contributor is video streaming (e.g. YouTube, iPlayer etc.), which accounted for 25% of all traffic.

Daniel Hennessy, VMB’s Director of Technical Strategy, said:

“It’s clear that people are becoming increasingly reliant upon fast, secure connections. They want to get the information they need, regardless of whether they’re at their office desks, on the move or sat at home.

Equally, businesses are seeing the advantage of technology such as cloud computing as well as implementing remote working infrastructure. This is an opportunity for workforces to become more agile as employees are given the freedom to be productive from any location, no longer nine to five.

But with this increase in data appetite comes a need for unconstrained network infrastructure. This means that Telco suppliers need to move away from costly incremental bandwidth upgrades and start giving businesses all the bandwidth they can eat, up front and without constraints.”

The operator claims to now be preparing for “more records to be broken” this summer, when major sporting events (e.g. 2012 London Olympic Games) combine with “more people than ever before working from home” to push up data usage on their network.