Virgin Media O2 Summarises UK Connectivity Trends for 2022
Broadband ISP and mobile operator Virgin Media (VMO2) has today published their usual round-up of customer connectivity habits for 2022, which among other things noted that customers downloaded 9% more broadband data per day than the previous year, with mobile traffic up 36% year-on-year.
As usual, it’s necessary to point out that demand for data is constantly rising and internet connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP. But it’s still interesting to see details like those that Virgin Media and O2 have put out, even if they are quite vague.
In order to avoid this becoming too laborious, we’ve summarised and simplified VMO2’s latest shotgun blast of data points below. The figures are based on an analysis of connectivity trends for tens of millions of customers, using anonymised and aggregated data, from 1st January to 19th December 2022.
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VMO2’s 2022 Connectivity Trends
➤ VMO2 saw a 49% rise on BBC 1 viewing figures while we cheered on the Lionesses on 31st July as they made history bringing football home.
➤ Football was responsible for the biggest O2 mobile data traffic spikes this year, with the lunchtime (1pm) England v Iran competition opener on 21st November driving record spikes in mobile data traffic on O2’s network. Compared to England’s opening game against Tunisia in the 2018 competition, mobile data traffic was up 361%.
➤ Train strikes kept Brits at home, with the biggest nationwide strike for over 30 years across June 21st, 23rd and 25th, resulting in a 72% reduction in City of London crowd volumes compared to the week prior, according to O2 Motion data. At the same time, broadband upload traffic peaked 5% week on week due to the corresponding increase of video calls on platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Download traffic levels were also up 10% – highlighting the nation’s dependence on broadband connectivity.
➤ Spain continues to top the list of most popular European destinations as average weekly mobile roaming volumes nearly tripled compared to Summer 2021.
➤ Online gaming continuing to drive record broadband traffic spikes in 2022. Call of Duty Warzone 2.0’s launch on 16th November saw the busiest day on record for gaming-related broadband data consumption. A close second was 14th December’s gaming releases for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Season 1 (Raids) alongside The Witcher 3 Next Gen update, with the day narrowly missing out on the top spot by a mere 0.6Gbps (Gigabits per second).
➤ The 2022 finals of the Premier League and Champions League saw huge mobile data surges, with mobile network traffic 37% and 30% higher than their respective 2021 finals. Further, during the evening of 19th October, when Prime Video streamed five Premier League matches and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II pre-download was released, Virgin Media’s broadband data consumption significantly spiked before peaking at 9:20pm when traffic was up 40% compared to an average weeknight in 2022.
➤ TikTok usage continued to grow throughout 2022, accounting for nearly 10% of all mobile app usage in November, while Snapchat and Instagram were responsible or only 2.5% and 1% respectively. Facebook remains the most popular mobile app overall, making up over a fifth (22%) of O2 customer app usage in November.
➤ Over half of Virgin Media’s Pay TV customers watched the Queen’s funeral, which also saw O2 mobile data traffic dip across the UK as 28 million people tuned in to watch, making it one of the country’s biggest ever TV events.
Jeanie York, CTO of VMO2, said: “Looking back on 2022, it’s clear that reliance on broadband and mobile connectivity is seeing traffic and data use grow more and more. This year, a number of major events that gripped the nation alongside huge gaming launches and the continuation of hybrid working, have all contributed to a record-breaking surge in customer traffic on our network and we see no sign of this changing.”
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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Tiktok is literal gen Z woke leftist brainwashing owned by the chinese communist party that rewards mental illnesses and hate for their respective countries with dopamine (while simultaneously blocking all the negativity and only promoting good values and love for the party on their domestic version)
India banned it long ago, the US is finally voting to ban it, it’s time the UK follows suit before the new generation is broken beyond repair
I see younger people at the gym, they come in, sit on a bit of equipment, phone in hand, and barely look up, they hardly do any exercise, and 90% of the time is spent bent over looking at their phone. So much time is wasted watching utter rubbish. It is the new tobacco, young people may not be smoking as much, but they are still made to be addicted to something that makes someone money somewhere, at the detriment of their health. It can’t be doing people any good at all mentally or physically.
Reward “mental illness”?
I would actually argue that smoking is less harmful than TikTok
Worse offenders are the ones hogging up the bench press at the gym while taking 5min between sets. Losing all the gains with their Quasimodo necks
Wow whats with all the negativity?