Broadband ISP KCOM Reveals Hull UK’s Internet Traffic Use Over Christmas
Macquarie-backed telecoms provider KCOM, which have deployed their own full fibre broadband (FTTP) network across 305,000 premises in parts of East Yorkshire (primarily Hull) and Lincolnshire (England), has revealed that customers in the Hull area consumed 2,500,000 GigaBytes (GB) of data traffic on Christmas Day 2025 (500,000GB more than usual) – it’s “busiest day ever for online traffic“.
During the whole of Christmas week, KCOM said their broadband network carried a whopping 24.2 PebiBytes (PiB) of data (we aren’t sure why they’ve opted to use PiB instead of PetaBytes, but each to their own). During the same week, KCOM customers streamed 10.9 PiB with YouTube (2.3 PiB) and Netflix (2.2 PiB) proving the streaming services of choice as viewers logged on to watch Stranger Things and various other shows.
Rounding out the Top Ten of the streaming services on KCOM’s network over Christmas were TikTok (0.9PiB), Sky Streaming [Sky Glass, Sky Stream] (0.9 PiB), Amazon Prime (0.6 PiB), BBC’s iPlayer (0.6 PiB) Disney+ (0.6 PiB), ITV Player (0.5 PiB) and Facebook video (0.5 PiB).
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The biggest gaming console winners on Christmas Day were the Sony PS5 and Microsoft Xbox, with tens of thousands of users downloading new games and content updates. Gaming and related software updates accounted for 3.4PiB of data transfer, with 60% coming from KCOM’s unique local caches (i.e. popular data that gets stored closer to end-users in their network), making it a faster and more reliable download process for Hull users.
The biggest surges in data traffic came at 10am and 10pm on Christmas Day, with a lull coming at 2pm as families sat down to their Christmas dinner before tuning in to see the King’s Speech.
Richard Schäfer, KCOM CEO, said:
“It’s been a huge Christmas for streaming services across the KCOM region and the amount of data that families are using is truly astounding.
As the UK’s most reliable network*, our full fibre network dealt with the huge amount of surfing, streaming and gaming which enabled families to sit back and enjoy their Christmas specials, season finales and box sets seamlessly.”
The bumper Christmas period comes on the back of a steady growth in data traffic on KCOM’s full fibre network since September 2025. During that time, the ISP has seen a 15% increase in demand for data usage across its network.
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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Why? Because these days laymen think a megabyte is 1,000 kilobytes. Assuming that they think about it at all–many don’t have any concept of it.
Kibi-/mebi-/gibi-/tebi-/pebi- are explicit and unambiguous.
They’re not exactly new or radical concepts either.
If anything it shows that someone at KCOM is tech-literate and knows what they’re talking about.
Astonishing how far ahead Netflix is of all the other professional TV streamers. More than double Sky and quadruple the PSBs. YouTube of course eclipsing everyone, the true PSB. It will be interesting to see how Netflix fares with HBO and Paramount pulling their content a lot of the comfort shows are gone – Friends, Big Bang Theory, Star Trek – no doubt accounting for a lot of background streaming.