A Week of Extremes as Virgin Media’s UK Internet Traffic Surges

Gigabit broadband ISP Virgin Media has reported a week of extreme variations in UK internet traffic, which saw both the lowest level of upstream traffic in 2021 occur on Tuesday and then, the very next day, one of the highest peaks in downstream traffic hit their network (thanks to another massive Call of Duty update).

The unusual trends started on Tuesday 30th March 2021, a day before the latest lockdown restrictions were due to be relaxed. On that day much of the United Kingdom found itself bathed in a heatwave, which saw temperatures in some parts of the country jump above 24c after a long period of colder weather.

On that same day Virgin Media recorded its “quietest weekday” for data uploads (e.g. video calls, sending emails) on fixed broadband lines so far in 2021, with traffic dropping by 19% during the afternoon of the hottest day of the year so far. But at the same time Virgin’s mobile customers, now largely untethered from home WiFi, saw the busiest day for mobile traffic this year, with usage up by 13% on recent weeks (their 5G customers also burnt through 7% more data than usual).

However, it was all change for Wednesday 31st, when the ISP reported their “biggest day for downloads on record.” As we’ve seen many times before, this event was triggered by the latest update to the popular Call of Duty: Warzone game (plus a smaller 8-14GB update for Black Ops Cold War). The mid-season update weighed in at over 50GB (GigaBytes) on most platforms and a staggering 133.6GB on PC if you needed both the Warzone and the Modern Warfare update.

Jeanie York, VM’s Chief Technology and Information Officer, said: “As restrictions continue to lift, the country starts to bounce back and many people move towards more hybrid models of work, we expect broadband behaviour to shift once again. Whatever the future holds, we are committed to keeping our customers connected at home or on-the-go.”

The majority of broadband ISPs are comfortable having to tackle such pressures on their networks. Many also employ Content Delivery Networks (CDN), which help to cache popular content closer to their end-users and this reduces the strain on external capacity links. You can also see the impact of Wednesday’s traffic surge on switches at the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which saw peaks above 5.6Tbps (Terabits per second).

We should point out 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), although usual trends often give this change a bit of a push.