ISPs and London Internet Exchange See Record UK Data Traffic
Internet traffic across UK broadband ISPs surged last night on the back of several Premier League football matches streamed on Amazon, which resulted in data usage across the London Internet Exchange (LINX) reaching a new record peak of 7.179Tbps (Terabits per second) and TalkTalk hitting 9.105Tbps.
The new peak record of 9.105Tbps was set on TalkTalk’s network last night at 9:20pm, overtaking their previous record of 8.715Tbps set on April 27th. A similar surge was also witnessed by other ISPs and can be seen by viewing yesterday’s aggregated traffic data from 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.).
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 when compared with normal conditions.
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Weekly LINX Traffic – 14th to 20th October 2022
Broadband and mobile providers use 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.
Nevertheless, 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).
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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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Interesting analysis and data
Good to see LINX Wales handling a 4K stream or so… (or perhaps a few lower quality streams?!)
The time has come to power down the LINX Wales experiment, not a good use of LINX members funds.
I see your point. When a residential connection may be shifting more data than LINX Wales and LINX Scotland combined it does bring the value of them into question.
No idea how the costs compare to the income, though. If they are profitable for LINX due to the kit they use and the port fees they’re receiving I’m sure they’ll be happy to keep them running.
Are they running at a loss with no prospect of breaking even or becoming profitable any time soon, LINX member?
Or an even better idea would be to actually put the legwork in to convince some meaningful content providers to peer there, not just in London and Manchester.
LINX Wales is hosted inside Vantage Data Centre, the largest data centre in Europe. Guess where many of the large content servers are sitting?
(e.g. Azure UK is there, meaning that our peering traffic to MS for Azure, Teams and XBox is going from our core router in Cardiff, over an expensive link to London, peering with MS in London and then tromboning back on the MS network to Newport. Not efficient for them or us.
Ps/ The hardware for LINX Wales was largely funded by Welsh Gov and DCMS and the engineering work to build it was resourced by Ogi so the burden on LINX Member was minimised
I think you are delusional that content providers are going to show up at LINX Wales. Look at how all of these altnets in the past couple of years have built out, first thing they do is rent a rack in Slough or Telehouse and join LINX + LONAP.
Their prefixes then show up to all the CDN via peering in London, there is no incentive for the CDN to build out to Wales to serve them if they already see the routes in London via an IXP.
If thought was given to a strategy to bring CDNs to Wales then you’d of only had your prefixes visible via transit to the CDNs, so it would have cost them to deliver to those routes. By building out to all the IXPs yourself you aren’t helping in bringing content providers in to Wales.
It doesn’t matter if Vantage is the largest DC in Europe, no one cares about that. Its still awkward to build into, there is a lack of cheap sub-£300/month waves to London.
IX Wales has a lot of members which were created to receive grant money. Think a load of “routers” which are actually a bunch of virtual machines… hence no traffic….
There’s a presentation online – Google for Grant_money_doesnt_buy_you_happiness
Ogi / Spectrum look to be part of that money grab.
The UK isn’t big enough to need many peering points. Existing points in London, Slough and Manchester provide sufficient diversity.
It costs a significant amount of money for a sizeable ISP or content provider to build their network into a new peering point. Even if they are already in the same building. There simply isn’t the volume of ISP traffic in Cardiff / Newport to make it viable.
‘The UK isn’t big enough to need many peering points. Existing points in London, Slough and Manchester provide sufficient diversity.’
Entirely true, though if you listen to some alleged experts they’ll tell you we should have peering in every large town and city as things break when round trip goes above 10ms. *sigh*