UPD2 England vs Wales Euro 2016 Match Starts UK Internet Traffic Surge
The UEFA Euro 2016 football match between England and Wales this afternoon, which kicked off at 2pm and occurred during working hours, triggered a 2 hour long surge of Internet traffic as office staff moved to keep a sly eye on proceedings by using video streaming services like iPlayer (BBC).
The previous England game against Russia produced almost no impact upon UK Internet traffic, not least because it occurred outside of working hours and that meant people could sit down in front of a traditional TV in order to enjoy the event.
However it’s always a different story when the national team play during working hours and on this occasion the UK had two teams playing against each other, which no doubt pushed the numbers up higher than usual. The first to report is LONAP (via AAISP) and you can clearly see the huge spike from 2pm to 4pm at the end.
Elsewhere the Leeds Internet Exchange (IXLeeds) reported that they delivered twice the usual weekday load (5Gbit) to Northern ISPs during the match and business ISP Timico noted that football viewing built up to 2.3Gbps (Gigabits per second) of streaming after half-time, which was spread across small / large offices and homes. Other ISPs have also reported a similar surge.
Three lions on my shirt
Optic light still gleaming
Massive traffic spurt
Never stopped me peeringNew traffic record, 198.7Gbit #ENGWAL
— LONAP (@LONAP) June 16, 2016
We are currently aware of slower than expected broadband speeds. This appears to be directly linked to high volumes of iPlayer traffic.
— Aquiss Broadband (@AquissBroadband) June 16, 2016
The match also occurred at the same time as news broke that MP Jo Cox had tragically lost her life after being shot and stabbed during an attack in Birstall, which may have also played a part in today’s traffic spike 🙁 .
UPDATE 17th June 2016 (7am)
Mobile operator EE claims to have seen the most data traffic ever on its 3G and 4G network yesterday, as England and Wales fans watched the match on their mobile devices. When Daniel Sturridge scored the winner, EE’s network data traffic was 50% higher than its last peak during Tim Cahill’s World Cup goal in 2014.
UPDATE 18th June 2016
The BBC reports that 11.8 million unique daily visitors hit their UK sport website on match day, which is up from the last record of 10.2 million (final day of the 2015-16 Premier League). Meanwhile 2.3 million were watching a video stream of the match online via the BBC’s site, which is double the previous record.
Elsewhere we’ve seen UK ISP Elite give a report on their Internet traffic from the event and suffice to say, it’s extreme.
Just look at the traffic going over our network during yesterday's England match! #EnglandvsWales #fibre pic.twitter.com/SFodOG0r1G
— Elite Limited (@eliteisp) June 17, 2016
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 Twitter, Google+, Facebook and Linkedin.
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The sooner England etc, are out the better, my connection speed was down from 80Mb to 8Mb and throwing so many errors we had problems downloading a 79KB document file.
However I found speeds returning after 3:15pm, so perhaps people were switching to mobile data on the journey home and freeing up the interwebs slightly.
my net was quite slow and was maxing out at around 4Mbps all afternoon.
A banal excuse for a sport but enough love it that it has a major impact on traffic on our broadband networks.
So be it. Let’s hope it leads to a rush away from cheap and poor broadband towards networks capable of handling this load.
Customer retention departments telling people to go elsewhere if they aren’t going to make a contribution to running costs would be great.
I would rush – except I am already with a PREMIUM ISP!
The BT backbone is the issue I suspect.
Incidentally I saw no impact from this however my service is not one that will price match SSE, Plusnet or anyone else.
They are fine with Plusnet handing out loss making deals as they simply don’t do discounts.
The result of not playing lowest bidder games for custom being that the game today didn’t make a dent.
Consistent loss-maker, Plusnet, wouldn’t exist without subsidies from parent BT Group. The objective of this accounting sham? To gouge market share from rival communications providers in the ‘budget’ sector. That’s our BT.
To the person above (Captain Cretin) who blames the backhaul networks…
Whilst we (A&A) are often quick to correctly lay the blame in that direction, our customers did not get increased latency on their lines, and we have the graphs to prove it. In other words, the backhaul was not congested. In other words, it isn’t the “fault” of the backbone.
If other ISPs had been buying sufficient capacity, and had had no internal networking issues, then, based on our results, they shouldn’t have seen any problems.
Alex Bloor
Business Manager, A&A
Thanks for that.
I am sure the ISP’s rep will also note that, as he is in here often.
OOOH, just picked up on something; my latency was fine, just available bandwidth dropped to 10% – 20% normal, then shot back up as people started to leave the office.
There has been something else weird going on at the same time; my wife was unable to download her daily .docx formated orders for several days, on her QQ account, however they downloaded fine on MY account – same internet connection!!