London Internet Exchange Sees Record Traffic Pass 10Tbps
The London Internet Exchange (LINX), which handles a key chunk of UK and global data traffic through their switches via around a thousand members (broadband ISPs, mobile operators etc.), has today reported that they set a new peak record for data traffic yesterday when the aggregate total topped 10.69Tbps (Terabits per second).
The new 10.7Tbps peak, which was officially recorded on Tuesday 17th September 2024 at 8:45pm, appears to have been largely driven by football fans heading online to stream several key matches. But the September 16th release of the latest iOS 18 update from Apple may have also been playing a role, as not everybody updates straight away, and it usually gets deployed gradually over a period of several days.
Just for a quick comparison. The latest figures represent a huge leap over the 7.83Tbps recorded by LINX in August 2023 (here), albeit not so much the 9.23Tbps seen in December 2023 (here). But it should be noted that those figures aren’t completely comparable because LINX has since added new sites in Jeddah (400Gbps), Riyadha (81Gbps) and Nairobi (6Gbps).
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LINX Traffic Overview from 11th to 18th September 2024
Broadband and mobile providers use sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and systems to help manage the load from big online events and software release, 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.
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. Ofcom’s Connected Nations 2023 study noted that the average monthly data volume per household on fixed broadband connections increased over the past year to 535 GigaBytes (up by 11%).
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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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For context, it hit a peak of 4.3Tbps during the first grim days of the lockdown in March 2020. So it’s more than doubled since then. I’m trying to find out when it first hit 1Tbps – does anyone know?
This was driven by a Fortnite update more than anything
The biggest peaks we’ve seen in the last few years are almost exclusively driven by games. Almost always either Fortnite or Call of Duty.
Ha, true