BT Reveals Rising Broadband and WiFi Usage Over Christmas

The consumer division of BT has today revealed that home broadband and WiFi usage on their national UK network “increased substantially” over the festive season and almost doubled (95%) year-on-year on Christmas Day.

Apparently the biggest usage surge occurred just before lunchtime on Christmas Day (+130% jump in online usage compared to last year), which BT claims was being driven by software downloads and video streaming to new Smartphones and Tablet computers as people unwrapped their presents and connected them to the network.

Similarly BT has reported a rise in usage of the Netflix video streaming service, which saw a 43% increase in five weeks and peaked during the evening of Sunday January 3rd 2016, the night before most people were due back at work.

Elsewhere time spent online via BT Wi-fi over the festive period was also up by 35% on the same period in 2014, increasing by more than 725 million minutes and more than 700 million extra MegaBytes (MBs) were consumed (a 50% rise over 2014).