Openreach Reveals Biggest UK Broadband Traffic Events for 2024

Network access provider Openreach (BT) has today revealed that broadband usage across their UK network increased by 10.5% in 2024 (higher than the c.9% recorded for 2023 and 2.5% in 2022) to total 103,590 PetaBytes (PB) of data, with December 2024 being the “busiest month of the year for broadband traffic” (1st Dec 2024 was the busiest day).

The operator typically supplies numerous broadband ISPs (e.g. TalkTalk, BT, Sky Broadband and hundreds more) across the country and as such their platform often sees the impact of major events, such as big software updates, online video game releases or live video streaming and sporting events.

Clive Selley, CEO of Openreach, said: “Fast, reliable connectivity is essential for the UK, and the increased traffic on our broadband network is evidence that customers are increasingly reliant on it in their daily lives.” In order to help underline this point, the operator has included a bullet point summary with some of the key traffic trends they saw during 2024, which we’ve summarised below.

Just remember that 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 and network operator.

Key findings for the UK’s broadband use during 2024 include: 

• The busiest day across the Openreach network was Sunday, December 1st, when 405 PB of data was consumed. This was unusually high due to a surge in online spending as people sought ‘Black Friday’ bargains, and downloaded the latest content update for popular online multi-player game, Fortnite.
• The 2^nd busiest day was Thursday 26^th December, which was due to new gaming consoles being used, and 8 Premier league games being streamed on Amazon Prime. More than 367 PB of data was consumed across the Openreach network.
• The next busiest day was Sunday November 24th, when 355 PB of data was consumed.
• The busiest months in 2024 were December at a usage of 9,707 PB, an 8.5% rise on December 2023 and November at 8,953 PB – an 8% increase on November 2023.
• The busiest day of the week is typically a Sunday.
• The busiest time on the network is usually between 8pm and 10pm
• The busiest hour during the festive period was between 20:00 and 21:00 on the 26^th December.
• Live football (Amazon Prime) and online gaming continue to have the greatest impact on UK’s broadband consumption.

Separately, Ofcom recently reported that the average monthly fixed broadband data usage is now 531GB (GigaBytes) per connection across “all technologies“, which rises to an average of 766GB when only looking at full-fibre connections. However, due to a change in the regulator’s methodology, we can’t compare this with the previous year’s results.