Broadband ISP TalkTalk Breaks Own UK Internet Traffic Record

Budget broadband ISP TalkTalk has reported that last week’s internet data traffic record of 6.85Tbps (Terabits per second), which was set on 10th Nov (here), has been broken again on Saturday 14th November 2020, when they hit a new peak of 6.94Tbps.

There were many reasons behind it this time – not just the continued restrictions caused by COVID19 or this week’s new Xbox consoles and ‘Call of Duty’ video game releases. Other reasons were the bad weather across much of the UK and the Amazon prime coverage of the rugby internationals.

We should remind readers that demand for data is constantly rising and so new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP (usage typically grows by 30%+ each year) but, every once in a while, it’s interesting to look at specific events like this one, especially when they come so soon after the first.

Most ISPs also employ Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to help manage the load from such events, which caches common content closer to end-users (i.e. improves performance without network strain) and lowers their impact on external links.