Openreach (BT) has revealed that broadband usage across their UK network of ISPs increased by around 2.5% during 2022 to 64,364 PetaBytes (PB) of data, which is up from 62,700 PB being downloaded in 2021, 50,000 PB in 2020 and 22,000 PB in 2019.
The latest figures actually represent somewhat of a revision to the annual summary that Openreach published a couple of weeks ago (here), albeit with additional data gathered during the Christmas period. We don’t wish to repeat that story, so we’ll keep this one short by focusing primarily on the changes.
As previously reported, the busiest day was Sunday 11th December 2022 (228.87PB – here), which occurred as much of the UK was blanketed in snow and many people stayed at home. But the second-busiest day of 2022 ended up being Boxing Day, when 228.73PB of data was carried across their network – no doubt driven by software updates for newly unwrapped devices, social media traffic and video streaming (e.g. Premier League football matches).
Openreach then states that it was a “was a similar story” the following day, 27th December 2022, as Christmas celebrations continued across much of the UK, and two more live football matches were broadcast online. A total of 225.34 PB of data was gobbled on that day.
Colin Lees, Openreach’s CTIO, said:
“Our network has once again kept the country connected throughout 2022 as we’ve experienced some pretty momentous occasions and moments we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.
The good news is that our network always stands up to the test. We have a team of experts working hard behind the scenes to make sure there’s enough capacity for every eventuality. They’re constantly looking out for what the next big broadband traffic day could be, whether that be live sports, new film releases on Netflix or a major gaming patch.”
At this point it’s worth taking a look at the aggregated traffic data from the London Internet Exchange (LINX) over the Christmas period, which handles a key chunk of UK and global data traffic through their switches via around a thousand members (broadband ISPs, mobile operators etc.). 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.
The results show that LINX saw a sharp fall on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as people opted to spend more time with family, but this promptly rebounded on Boxing Day (26th) and, much as Openreach observed, the 27th was also quite busy. Sadly, Openreach didn’t include any data for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, but we assume it probably follows a similar trend (dip) to LINX.
The 3rd January 2023 (yesterday) was also extremely busy as people returned to work after the bank holiday. The chart below is measured in Terabits per second (Tbps).
LINX UK Christmas 2022 and New Year 2023 Data Traffic
Demand for data is constantly rising and broadband / mobile 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 are fairly small to modest and not especially remarkable, particularly when compared with the huge changes seen during the 2020/21 pandemic period.
UPDATE 5th Jan 2023
Openreach has kindly provided some extra data for the Christmas and New Year period.
2021/22 | 2022/23 | |
Christmas Day | 189.12 PB | 199.02 PB |
Boxing Day | 203.72 PB | 228.74 PB |
New Years Day | 201.10 PB (1 Jan 2022) | 207.36 PB (1 Jan 2023) |
Looking at the LINX UK graph, on Boxing day Openreach handled around 35,000 times the amount of traffic traversing the LINX network. That’s impressive.
Remember, Openreach is talking about PB per day, while LINX is talking about Tb / sec.
Oh yeah lol. So approximately twice as much data traversed the LINX Network, than over Openreach, if roughly averaged out over 24 hours. Still very impressive for both Networks. I stand corrected, assuming I’ve worked it out correctly this time.
If we estimate an average of 5Tbps over the LINX over 24 hours, that’s 54PB per day (8 bits = 1 byte). So you have it the wrong way round: there’s more Openreach traffic than LINX traffic.
That’s to be expected:
– much traffic comes from CDN nodes hosted inside the large consumer ISPs
– some traffic is from destinations on the Internet outside the UK
– large backbone ISPs have direct private peering connections (bypassing IXPs)
I see my 56k modem is still making a dent.
Must be all those teens in their bedrooms paying with themselves, or online.
As Project Gigabit/FTTP rollout continues I can only see this continuing on this trajectory.
£100pm for Sky or £20pm for 2 streaming services ?
Limited storage ? No worries… it won’t take long to redownload a game etc if you need the space for something else now.
“Wah… No-one needs 1Gbps!” Maybe not but I’m sure they’ll end up using it if they have it.
Much like how no-one needs 4K but once they’ve used it they won’t want to go back.
That’s because of bragging rights, look at a YouTube video at 720p and 2k and try to see any difference apart from the size and your internet utilisation, if you can download the video file, run vlc or something and take a screenshot and compare, then run the files side by side using 2 instances of a software player and from a few metres away tell me you see much of a difference… on my phone I run 480p and on the full hd telly 1080 does everything I need, setting lower resolution saves decoding power, internet congestion etc. Overall most content is 1080p newer stuff is made in native 4k, that content will have details in 4k and should be run in 4k, otherwise most tellys have upscalers built in, it’ll do a decent job, but if your old camcorder family footage is only 720, you’re just going to have live with it since you can’t time travel with a 4k camcorder and redo the footage… my emulators got upscalers that can increase the ps1 titles into bigger 3d blocks, what’s the point, it was never hd and a waste of electricity trying to increase the resolution. Other filters are good.
@John
Sorry I should have been clearer in my comparison regarding 4K… I meant content that can be distinguished between on a 4K monitor vs Full HD. Much like 60Hz vs 144Hz whilst playing games… a lot of people don’t notice the difference until they go back.
Will be interesting to see if the total amount downloaded will only show a small increases going forward. Wondering if this will be the new normal.
I would assume most of the massive increase over the years was for streaming services and downloading games. It would seem that this major growth is coming to an end as most people are now signed up to the new services.
The increase in 2020 and 2021 made sense as people were forced to stay home due to covid. But in 2022 they were not, but it seemed they choose to continue the same behavior. This will have long reaching effects on a lot of aspects to our society and economy.
With mainstream TV moving to online transmission these increases will continue for sometime yet. May even increase
@Witcher. What sort of society do we have where everyone stays home and watches tv and plays games? Where all shopping is funneled to Amazon who pay no tax? It’s not looking good is it?
Surveys suggest that people are less TV now
…watching less TV now
You have to remember since last year Sky have launched their Glass product which is delivered over the internet. Not sure how much a UHD football match on Sky Sports would use and would have a guess even a HD movie would use a few hundred MBs