Broadband ISP TalkTalk Reveals Q4 2020 UK Internet Trends
TalkTalk has today shared a preview from the latest volume (2) of their new ‘Internet Insights‘ report with us, which is a quarterly analysis of the ISP’s network traffic and usage trends. For example, it notes that UK internet usage rose nationally by 40% during 2020, driven by streaming, online gaming and working from home.
We note that the provider’s highest ever data usage peak remains at 7.63Tbps (Terabits per second), which was set on the 16th December 2020 (up from 7.23Tbps just a week earlier) and was largely driven by a combination of football on Amazon Prime’s video streaming service and the latest update for Call of Duty (a popular online game).
In terms of the other highlights – During 2020 Scotland (45%) saw the highest regional increase, while the North West (32%) was the lowest. Meanwhile usage among people aged 75 and over increased by 24% from June to December 2020, which was the biggest of any age demographic. Elsewhere 9pm became the busiest time for network data usage across the UK, although 7pm is the time when most devices are connected to a home broadband router.
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Finally, there was an 8% rise in the number of devices connected last year, equating to an average of 12 connected per household per day, rising to 13 by the end of the year. The nationwide shift to home working in March-April 2020 saw PCs and laptops overtake mobiles as the most new devices connected for the first time, while the number of printers being connected to TalkTalk’s network increased by 45% in the last year.
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Seems pretty accurate that the 65+ have now moved online, people in there 50s seem to have kept themselves somewhat balanced on using internet and getting out and about and kids will have started rising due to getting devices and consoles.
Scotland at the highest? I can see that since what else can we do just now.
Very interesting that TalkTalk are quoting 40%, as Virgin Media are using a 95% figure when explaining congestion problems to people on their forums. How likely is it that two very large ISPs would see growth increases that different from each other?
Different customer profiles. Generally the ISPs that sit higher up the value chain will likely have customers who are more likely to have been able to work from home and who will have more devices in their homes consuming data.
It’s not a hard and fast rule but you’d expect a reasonable correlation.
TalkTalk are talking about downstream, Virgin Media upstream.