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England FIFA 2022 World Cup Match Causes UK Internet Traffic Surge UPDATE2

Monday, Nov 21st, 2022 (3:47 pm) - Score 1,920
September 3, 2022, Doha, Qatar. FIFA World Cup and official Adidas Al Rihla ball on the green lawn of the stadium.

Data traffic flowing through the London Internet Exchange (LINX) has today hit another record level – peaking at 7.424Tbps (Terabits per second) at 3:10pm – on the back of England’s first FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 match against Iran, which saw the three lions walk away with a 6-2 win.

The fact the match took place outside a traditional holiday period and during normal working hours will have meant that a lot of people were probably streaming it at work or via their Smartphones, rather than via a traditional TV broadcast. At the time of writing, we don’t have any data from individual broadband ISPs or mobile operators, but LINX is normally a good indicator of major trends in traffic flow.

LINX handles a key chunk of UK and global data traffic through their switches via around 1,000 members (ISPs, mobile operators etc.) and they only recently peaked at 7.2Tbps last week, which was on the back of the Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 release. But it’s also fairly traditional for major sporting events, such as the World Cup, to set new traffic records, and so it has come to pass again.

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. Credits to Thinkbroadband for spotting this first.

LINX-Traffic-21st-Nov-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.

The next Group B match of interest today will be Wales v USA at 19:00. But that will occur outside of working hours.

UPDATE 22nd Nov 2022 @ 7:20am

TalkTalk has reported that internet traffic across their network of both homes and businesses was up by 36% against the same time last week during The Three Lions’ 6-2 win over Iran, reaching a peak of 5.60Tbps. But it should be said that this was not a record, since the ISP has previously hit 9.105Tbps on the back of football streaming, which occurred outside of working hours.

UPDATE 22nd Nov 2022 @ 1:46pm

Openreach has informed us that the amount of data used across their network increased by around 20% (compared to the same period in the previous week) as England kicked off their World Cup campaign. More than 23 PetaBytes (PB) of data was carried across the network between 1pm and 4pm yesterday, compared to 19PB for the same period, 7 days earlier.

NOTE: 1 PetaByte is equal to 1,000 TeraBytes (TB) or 1,000,000 GigaBytes (GB).
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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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Comments
4 Responses
  1. Avatar photo DHCPv6 says:

    Manx-IX didn’t set any records today with 0Kbp/s 😉

    Mind you, neither did LINX Wales

    1. Avatar photo Matt says:

      LINX Wales is a waste of electricity at this point. I’m don’t understand why it’s not just dropped.

    2. Avatar photo Jackster says:

      I just had to check the bandwidth graph for it. Jesus Christ.
      My home internet connection sees more traffic than that IX…

      Someone must have been downloading a load of porn the other day though. Solid 120mbps for 24 hours.

  2. Avatar photo Steve says:

    Zen was up in the 300ms range for the entire match.

Comments are closed

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