CoD Pushes TalkTalk Broadband Traffic to New 8.71 Tbps Record UPDATE

Internet traffic across UK broadband ISPs surged last night as people tuned in to stream the Champions League semi-final and to download the latest 40GB (GigaByte) ‘Season 3’ update for the popular ‘Call of Duty Warzone’ video game. As a result, TalkTalk set a new peak traffic record of 8.715Tbps (Terabits per second).

The new peak occurred at around 9:20pm last night on TalkTalk’s network (27th April 2022), which compares with their previous record of 8.1Tbps in December 2021 and 7.6Tbps in December 2020.

A similar surge was also witnessed by other ISPs and can be seen by viewing yesterday’s aggregated traffic data from the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which handles a key chunk of UK and global data traffic through their switches via around a thousand members (broadband ISPs, mobile operators etc.).

The total aggregated traffic over LINX hit a peak of about 6.95Tbps at around 8:20pm, which is noticeably higher than the peaks seen during the preceding days. However, LINX does not provide a complete overview of the internet traffic flow from all ISPs, but they do give a useful indication of how much extra traffic is flowing around.

LINX Traffic – 22nd – 28th April 2022

Like other big ISPs, TalkTalk will be using 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 adding 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).

Phil Haslam, TalkTalk’s Chief Technology Officer (BT), said: “A peak in April is very unusual, especially with good weather. It’s a reminder of the ever-growing demand for great Wi-Fi and full fibre broadband“.

UPDATE 4:45pm

Virgin Media reports that traffic over the same period was up 11.9% on average and up 23.8% on the previous week. Over the course of the evening (4pm-12am), the average Virgin Media user consumed 12.1GB of data, up nearly a third (29%) on the previous week. The spike meant Wednesday was the busiest day of the year on Virgin Media’s network, but sadly we don’t get a Tbps figure from VM.