UK TalkTalk Broadband ISP Traffic Breaks 557GBps Record

Internet and phone provider TalkTalk reports that its broadband network in the United Kingdom was “busier than ever” over the Christmas and the New Year period. Customer downloads of new Tablet updates and pre-work emails pushed data traffic to a peak of 557GBps (GigaBytes per second?) on New Year’s Day.

Overall the ISPs network is now said to be handling “more than twice as much data as two years ago“. Indeed during the 2010 Christmas period TalkTalk claims to have averaged around 240GBps, rising to 320GBps during 2011 and 500GBps this year (note: it’s actually Gigabits but for some reason TalkTalk insist on it being the incorrect GigaBytes).

Clive Dorsman, TalkTalks Chief Technology Officer, said:

“At the same time, a cache serving our network, which distributes updates from companies such as Apple and Microsoft saw traffic increase by 15 to 20 gigabytes per second, as customers downloaded updates for new devices.

TalkTalk’s Next Generation Network is already installed at 2,695 exchanges and covers 93 per cent of the population. That’s three times as many exchanges as BT’s 21st Century Network and twice as many as Cable and Wireless, now part of Vodafone.”

Thankfully TalkTalk has pledged to keep pace with demand and intends to “increase capacity a hundred fold within the next five years“. Now if Mr Dorsman could just stop confusing his GigaBytes as “gb” (it’s supposed to be uppercase GB for GigaBytes to avoid confusion with “bits”) then the I.T. gremlins would be most pleased.

UPDATE 10:37am

TalkTalk have promptly adjusted their update to read GB instead of gb 🙂 and corrected their exchange figure to 2,695. Just for the record, it’s actually 557 Gigabits and NOT GigaBytes. Hay ho.