ISP Sky Broadband Sees UK Network Traffic Peak at 19.9Tbps
UK ISP Sky Broadband has today reported that internet traffic passing over their network reached its “highest ever peak” of 19.9Tbps (Terabits per second) last night, which was fuelled by customers going online via Amazon’s Prime Video streaming service in order to watch their “exclusive” live Premier League Football matches.
The figures compare with a similar event on Wednesday night, which saw internet traffic over rival ISP TalkTalk top 8.1Tbps (here), while BT reached 25.5Tbps (here). At the time we predicted that Thursday night would follow a similar trend and this has now been confirmed by Sky.
The Director of Propositions at Sky Broadband, Aman Bhatti, said: “Last night, we saw the Sky Broadband network peak, with traffic reaching a new high of 19.9Tbps. As part of our ongoing commitment to providing customers with the fastest and most reliable broadband, 98% of streamers on our network watched the games unfold in HD or UHD quality – up 12% year on year.”
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Like other big ISPs, Sky employs sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and systems 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). This in turn lowers the provider’s impact on external links and helps to keep costs down.
As usual, we should point out that demand for data is constantly rising and broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP (usage typically grows by 30%+ each 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 and Linkedin.
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I notice also Sky didn’t make some fuss about how terrible it was providing services customers pay for to customers. Must just BT whose CEO can’t cope…
Do Sky actually own and maintain the ADSL/fibre networks that they utilize for “their” broadband service?
That depends on your definition of own and maintain.
Very few providers own their own fibre backhaul (between the exchange and the ISP). Even those who run their own backhaul.
The likes of Talktalk own little to no fibre that runs across the country. The majority of their backhaul is leased dark fibre.
Sky do own a bit of fibre but do also lease a lot of dark fibre.
In both above cases it is their own backhaul network that they have full control of though.
Even the likes of BT Wholesale lease lots of fibre, there’s nothing new or unique in doing that.
It’s very expensive building thousands of miles of fibre links between hundreds of cities.
It makes sense to utilise what’s already in the ground.
The local loop between home and exchange is entirely owned by Openreach.
Sky own the fibre network that formerly belonged to Easynet and before them Ipsaris.
They purchase capacity from a number of sources and make extensive use of Openreach, Virgin Media and others on the edges.
Sky is a major LLU operator with kit in BT exchanges. Sky also owns a network starting from the time that it bought Easynet which had a fibre network running along canal routes.