EE and BT UK Report Surge in Boxing Day Fixed Broadband Traffic

Information supplied by BT has revealed that customers on their core fixed broadband ISP network (including Consumer, Enterprise and EE) consumed a total of 141PB (PetaBytes) of internet data on Boxing Day 2022, which is up by 17.5% from 120PB on the same day in 2021.

The Boxing Day increase of 17.5% almost mirrors the 18.02% increase reported by Sky Broadband for the same day earlier this week (here). As for Christmas Day, BT reported a data usage rise from 112PB in 2021 to 121PB in 2022 (up by 8.04%), which is once again similar to the 9.52% increase reported by Sky for the same day.

Christmas Day is traditionally a fairly quiet period for fixed line data usage, as many people prefer to spend their time with family and a lot of businesses remain closed. But this is usually reversed on Boxing Day, when a lot more time is spent playing with new internet-connected gadgets (many of which need software updates after being connected) and going online to stream football matches etc.

Demand for data is of course constantly rising and home broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP. But overall, the increases seen during 2022 so far have been fairly small to modest and are not especially remarkable (examples here and here).