Broadband ISPs Brace for UK Traffic Surge on CoD Black Ops 6 Release

Internet service providers across the UK are gearing up for a busy Friday and surge in data traffic, which is once again expected to be fuelled by the release of another ‘Call of Duty’ video game on PC and consoles – Black Ops 6. But despite some frivolous claims that this could cause a “broadband blackout” (here), the event is nothing that ISPs haven’t had to handle before.

The concerns about the impact of Black Ops 6 on UK internet connectivity largely stems from older reports, which predicted that the download would weigh in at a colossal 300GB (GigaBytes). But this only applies to people making a full installation from scratch – this also includes CoD MW2, MW3, Warzone, all content packs and all language packs. Most players won’t be doing that and will often have already downloaded the older content.

The actual file sizes for just Black Ops 6 are much more in keeping with past CoD releases, which means they’re still huge, but nothing that internet providers haven’t had to handle before. In addition, many players will have already preloaded the game ahead of release on 25th October 2024 (pre-loading began at 5pm on 21st Oct in the UK).

Broadband and mobile providers typically 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.

Put another way, we do expect a modest to high traffic surge on release day, particularly as there are often last-minute patches that get deployed as new games unlock (i.e. even those that pre-loaded may get hit by those). Some consumers with certain providers might still experience a reduction in their normal broadband speeds, but such falls are usually only small to modest and rarely cause too much of a problem (assuming the provider has done its due diligence with capacity planning).

Lest we forget that 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 535GB (up by 11%), which also helps to put the large size of Black Ops 6 – a single game release – into context.

So contrary to one newspaper claiming that “Call of Duty gamers pose serious threat to UK internet“, the reality on the day may be rather more mundane than that, thanks in no small part to the excellent work of each ISP and their network management teams.