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ISP TalkTalk Sees Sunday UK Internet Data Traffic Hit 7.23Tbps

Monday, Dec 7th, 2020 (11:21 am) - Score 8,616
talktalk uk broadband isp 2020

Budget broadband ISP TalkTalk has reported yet another new internet data traffic record of 7.23Tbps (Terabits per second), which was set yesterday evening at 8:30pm. This is enough to beat their previous record of 6.94Tbps (here), which was set on 14th November 2020 when various popular video game updates were released.

Apparently, this time around the main drivers of high traffic came from video streaming, with many consumers watching live football matches and films on various different services. Despite this it’s worth noting that TalkTalk’s traffic volumes are much smaller than some of their rivals, with BT last month seeing peaks of around 18Tbps and Sky Broadband hitting 16.6Tbps (here).

talktalk traffic 6th dec 2020

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. We do however wish that TalkTalk’s charts would include some labelling for the different colours and in the left axis they appear to confuse Gigabits with Terabits.

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.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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Comments
18 Responses
  1. Avatar photo Dave Burstein says:

    Mark – Do you have a good source on bandwidth demand growth? I ask because I’m seeing it fall below 30% in some countries but I don;t have a good source for the UJ

    1. Mark-Jackson Mark Jackson says:

      We covered a few studies like that back in the March-June 2020 (covid19 lockdown) period. Most broadly seemed to agree that speeds fell only a tiny bit in the UK, around 1-3%, but were broadly pretty stable.

    2. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

      Surely growth is universally upwards. Any signicant downward trend you are seeing indicates routing around the measuring point.

      World Regions Growth 2000-2020 (some continents obviously starting at low base)

      Africa 13898%
      Asia 2136%
      Europe 593%
      Latin America / Caribbean 2489%
      Middle East 5527%
      North America 208%
      Oceania / Australia 279%

      Within these UK increase is 8.7% for this period according to https://www.internetworldstats.com/

  2. Avatar photo Broadband says:

    Look like one day all isps will bring back usage allowance as unlimited could be ended.

    1. Avatar photo Martin Pitt - Aquiss says:

      How have you come to this conclusion exactly?

    2. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

      @Broadband
      Only if people abuse the privilege of faster speeds and don’t transfer unecessary data due to bad practice. We humans can only consume so much content.

      We are restricted inevitably by the speed that we purchase and we need to observe the T&Cs. People will probably only have a problem if they are performing business like activities on residential services, a trend that appears to be on the increase and may be a challenge to some FTTP providers offering 1Gbps symetrical going forward.

      All that is certain is the base costs of providing service will go up, the cost per data unit will go down and the market will charge whatever they can get away with.

    3. Avatar photo Marl says:

      Why would they bring back limited plans exactly? The network is coping fine with demand

    4. Avatar photo Ben says:

      With all the new FTTP providers and providers like Virgin now doing Gigabit they’d be morons to start adding limits.

  3. Avatar photo Alex says:

    Idle observation: averaged over their entire customer base, that’s about 1.71 Mbit/s/customer. Also, the minimum traffic level is 1.1 Tbit/s, which is about 0.26 Mbit/s/customer.

    Not quite as idle observation: each pixel in the graph has an area of about 154 GB, so their total traffic for the day was about 42 PB. That works out to about 0.92 Mbit/s/customer averaged over the entire day, which would be 300 GB/month/customer.

    Total traffic on the day of the previous record was actually about 4% higher, at 43.8 PB.

    (For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t think that every customer was active simultaneously at any point in the graph, nor that every customer uses the same amount per month… nor that extrapolating a record-setting day to an entire month will produce their actual monthly figures.)

  4. Avatar photo Content consumer says:

    @Meadmodj

    I love our gigabit fttp and download furiously as and when needed. That’s the whole idea. I look forward to 10gbps

    1. Avatar photo Meadmodj says:

      I am not saying it is not a nice experience. The issue though will be whether there is something at the other end that can deliver anything like that.

  5. Avatar photo Dave says:

    I’m with talk talk I used to get between 60-80mb download. Now I’m lucky to get between 3-4mb. Does anyone know where I can review them as their customer support is athocious!

    1. Avatar photo Martin Pitt - Aquiss says:

      Maybe a website called ISPreview would be ideal for placing your review? Oh wait….

  6. Avatar photo Loz says:

    I just terminated my contract with talk talk. Rarely got the service l was paying for. Same as above customer. Paid fur 80 git 46 at best. Cost me £50 to terminate. So angry! They didn’t uphold their side of the contract. Why do l have to pay? Had chabce after chabce to rectify problems… worst service/provider ever. Glad to see back of them!

    1. Avatar photo Craig says:

      Who did you switch to?

    2. Avatar photo Mark says:

      How are they not sticking to the contract exactly? Just because you’re paying for the top package doesn’t mean your line is capable of receiving the speeds. If they were above the handback threshold set by OR then they were keeping to it. You obviously didn’t get in touch with them as if you did you’d know that if your speeds did fall below the threshold they have 28 days to fix it or you can leave penalty free.

      Also, just another quick point, no provider offers an 80Mb package. The profile is set to 80/20 if your line can handle it but you are paying for an “up to” 67Mb service

    3. Avatar photo Mark says:

      Oh, one further point… Your punctuation and spelling is very similar to that of the “other customer” above (Dave) so why do I get a feeling that you are both the same person… Certainly not an uncommon thing on this website!

  7. Avatar photo Samson Oshitola says:

    It was so pathetic yesterday after losing services throughout after complaining for months about bad service,I could have turned to another providers but they were all the same.

Comments are closed

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