ISP Sky Broadband Sets New UK Traffic Record of 18.29Tbps

Customers of UK ISP Sky Broadband helped to push internet traffic up to a new peak of 18.29Tbps (Terabits per second) last Sunday 6th December 2020, which is up sharply from the previous peak of 16.6Tbps recorded only last month (here). Sky said their network coped well with this surge.

Rival internet provider TalkTalk also set a new record last Sunday (here), which was largely attributed to cold weather and COVID-19 helping to encourage consumers to watch live football matches and films on various different video streaming services. Sky told ISPreview.co.uk that they saw a similar trend, particularly on their own services and via Netflix.

Just for comparison, Sky said their usual usage peak on a Sunday tends to be around 15.2Tbps (average of the last six peaks on Sundays). Admittedly demand for data is constantly rising and so new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP (usage across the industry typically grows by 30%+ per year – averaged). Indeed, just three years ago Sky were peaking at only 8Tbps (here).

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