Virgin Media O2 UK Report Record Broadband Traffic Last Week
UK ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) has today finally confirmed that they too also saw their “highest traffic peak on record” on Wednesday (19th Oct) last week, which occurred as football fans tuned into stream Premier League matches on Amazon (Prime Video) and gamers preloaded the latest ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2‘ game ahead of its release.
As a result, Virgin Media said that their network data consumption “significantly spiked” before peaking at 9:20pm – when traffic was up 40% compared to an average weeknight in 2022. In the space of just a few hours (6pm-12am), the average broadband user consumed a whopping 8.43GB (GigaBytes) of data, although sadly they didn’t provide an overall figure for their network traffic (usually expressed in ‘Terabits per second’).
All of this is consistent with what broadband ISP TalkTalk and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) separately reported last week (here). As we’ve said before, 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) – this has been the way since the internet was first invented.
At the same time, the capacity of backhaul and international fibre links continues to grow as technology improves, while the costs of moving all that data around tends to fall.
Jeanie York, Chief Technology Officer at VVMO2, said:
“Whilst we’re used to seeing sustained growth in usage and significant spikes on our network, the latest Prime Premier League games and Call of Duty: Warzone 2 release has smashed our previous traffic peak record out of the park – with traffic at heights hard to imagine even just a few years ago.
Whilst it’s hard to predict what will come next in the world of streaming and gaming, one thing is for certain; with gigabit speeds and an ultra-reliable service to match, we have the network that is ready for it all.”
End.
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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It wasn’t even WZ2 it was just the campaign that was preloadable lol
Maybe it was because TalkTalk and Virgin Media O2’s service was working properly for once??
something i find interesting from an observational aspect (and wonder how related to this it is) on how the internet has changed from recent times from a couple of decades ago is the degree of government invasion into internet privacy which has lead to the usage of VPNs.
Now these VPNs themselves, effectively have a traffic amplification nature to them, which in turn these ISPs then have to bear the cost of – rather than having their own direct internal transit to the destination, it might be now home > vpn in datacentre > user
that additional hop puts greater demand on networks, im surprised that ISPs didn’t push back more on government over-reach.
You make a good point..
What’s ‘direct internal transit’ please?
Re: What’s ‘direct internal transit’ please?
If I didn’t use a VPN, I might access a website. The data will travel from the server or CDN hosting the site to me. It might go across some transit links, or a peering link (either via an internet exchange like LINX or a direct connection between my ISP and a CDN).
If I use a VPN, the traffic first must go to my VPN provider (potentially going via LINX or similar), and then from the VPN provider to my ISP. This might mean that the traffic takes a less optimal or more expensive route: if my ISP has to pay for transit to connect to the VPN provider, and the data I transfer is going via that route rather than via a cheaper peering link.
On your wider point for ISPs carrying enough traffic that they have on-net content delivery, which I presume is what you were referring to with ‘internal transit’, VPN traffic generated by people trying to avoid government spying is a tiny proportion of the total. People working from home going via corporate VPNs, ZScaler, etc, account for far more traffic.
I’m not sure what your example traffic flow refers to. Going from home to a DC then to yourself isn’t really a thing unless you’re connecting to resources at home via a VPN, in which case the VPN will be terminating at home, or bouncing off home to go to the Internet, in which case the VPN will terminate at home.
Anyway the only extra load VPN usage generates is where traffic would usually be handled internally via content delivery networks and it instead leaves the ISP’s network. ISPs can easily manage this if traffic starts to hit high levels by peering with the networks hosting the VPNs.
It isn’t worth having a debate with government over. There are far bigger inconveniences with the laws as they stand than a tiny traffic increase across core and transit/peering.
‘If I use a VPN, the traffic first must go to my VPN provider (potentially going via LINX or similar), and then from the VPN provider to my ISP.’
It’s going to go from your ISP to your VPN provider then from them to whatever content you’re accessing, then the return path back.
ISP can mitigate this by getting peering to the ISP hosting the VPN provider. VPN providers don’t generally use their own networks for this – that’s kinda a give away when they’re trying to avoid filters, geolocation, etc.
A small cost increase but as you mentioned transit is a specific thing quite different thing from anything internal which was why I asked the question. Internal transit isn’t a thing.
Most VPN usage will be down to circumventing regional restrictions applied to media by it’s distributors not sure to people trying to stop some perceived that to their privacy.
Surprising. As its always down. Had almost daily planned and emergency maintenance since having it installed