Virgin Media O2 UK Sets New Gaming Traffic Record of 21Tbps

Broadband ISP Virgin Media (VMO2) saw its “busiest day ever on record for data consumption” (for gaming) on 16th Nov 2022 – trigged by the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which pushed downstream internet traffic to a peak of 21Tbps (21 Terabits per second) and a massive 138 petabytes (PB) of data downloaded.

The latest version of Call of Duty’s hugely popular Battle Royale video game – weighing in at around 70GB (GigaBytes) in size – was actually made available for preload from Monday 14th November, but it was in the early hours of Wednesday 16th November that saw gamers get ready for the big launch. Virgin’s traffic was up 103% between 3am and 8am compared to the average Wednesday.

Comparing Warzone 2.0 to the recent Call of Duty releases and updates, the network traffic peak seen on Wednesday morning was 33% higher than the most recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II update on Friday 4th November.

However, traffic on the 16th wasn’t quite an overall record for the operator, which previously peaked slightly higher than 21Tbps on October 19th, when Amazon Prime Video simultaneously streamed five live Premier League games (here).

Jeanie York, CTO at Virgin Media O2, said:

“Gaming is continuing to drive record network spikes on our network, proving just how popular online gaming is with our customers. Our gigabit network, backed up by our market leading Wi-Fi guarantee, is the perfect ally to keep gamers ahead of the game.”

Data from the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which handles a key chunk of UK and global data traffic through their switches via a thousand members (ISPs, mobile operators etc.), largely confirmed Virgin Media’s experience, with the exchange reaching a similar peak to the one they hit on 19th October – around 7.2Tbps (Terabits per second).

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. Internet providers will also 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).

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). This has been true ever since the internet first sprang to life.