Three UK Reports an All-Time Mobile Traffic High of 1068 Gbps

Mobile operator Three UK has reported seeing a “record-breaking weekend” of data traffic (mobile broadband) peaks. This included a Saturday evening high on the back of the Champions League final and the highest daily traffic volume on Sunday due, in part, to the release of Stranger Things Season 4 on Netflix.

The first data peak hit 1068Gbps (Gigabits per second) between 21:00 and 21:15 on Saturday evening. But the following day brought another record as the network reached its highest daily volume of all time. In total, “7408Tb” of data was consumed on the network throughout Sunday (we think they mean TeraBytes, not Terabits), driven by an uplift in Netflix usage – Traffic on the streaming service peaked 24% above the previous week.

The peaks were also evident when looking at 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.). Traffic on Saturday peaked at just over 6Tbps (Terabits per second), which compares with the highest peak of around 5.4Tbps on the previous Saturday (21st May).

David Hennessy, CTO of Three UK, said: “Whether it’s enjoying live sport, or bingeing the latest much-watch series, our customers are streaming more than ever. Last weekend saw record-breaking levels of data consumed on our network. We can expect more data peaks in the months ahead, that’s why we are continuing to invest over £2 billion in improving 4G and rolling out 5G to all four corners of the UK.”

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 (broadband consumers seem increase their usage by 30%+ each year).