A Snapshot of Home Broadband Traffic on Gigaclear’s FTTP Network

Rural fibre optic ISP Gigaclear, which this week announced plans to launch a new 5000Mbps service during early 2016 (here), has today revealed a few interesting bites of information about data traffic on their Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network.

The information was released this afternoon as part of a conference being held by the UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) at the BT Tower building in London. As part of the event Matthew Hare, Gigaclear’s CEO, gave a speech and also showed traffic from a 1Gbps “residential” connection.

At this point we’re not entirely sure if this represents an average across all of their 1Gbps using customers or has instead been taken from the connection of a selected individual. The latter, which seems most likely given the use of “connection” rather than “connections” in the title, would be distantly less interesting as we already know plenty of ADSL users that push similar usage levels.

Never the less 317GB (GigaBytes) per month is well above what Ofcom recorded last year as the monthly average for fixed line broadband customers in the UK: 58GB (GigaBytes) of data per connection (includes 7GB of uploads), which is up sharply from 30GB in 2013 (here).

Matthew Hare also used Neilson’s Law to predict that we’ll be “needing” 10Gbps connections by 2023, but we’ll leave the debate on that one to our readers.