Virgin Media O2 UK Sees Record Broadband Traffic Spike from Footy Streaming
Internet provider Virgin Media (O2) has reported that their fixed broadband network just recorded the “biggest broadband traffic spike in its history“, which occurred after customers streaming the ‘Arsenal v Atletico Madrid’ Champions League semi-final pushed traffic 4.2% higher than the previous peak and 17% higher than an average Tuesday evening in 2026.
Incidentally the previous peak was also driven by streaming traffic from Liverpool’s Champions League clash against Real Madrid on 4th November 2025, underlining the extra data demands that major live-streamed sporting events place on broadband networks. The latest record was reached between 8pm and 10pm on 5th May 2026.
However, ISPs do make use of sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and traffic management systems to help manage the load from big online events, which caches popular content closer in their 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.
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Jeanie York, Chief Technology Officer at VMO2, said:
“Live sport is one of the biggest drivers of broadband traffic in the UK and last night’s Champions League semi-final set a record on our network. As more people stream the biggest sporting moments from home, reliable, high-capacity connectivity has never been more important. Our network is built to handle these huge spikes so customers can keep watching without interruption.”
At this point it’s worth remembering 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. Just for some added context, Ofcom revealed toward the end of 2025 that the average monthly data usage per connection is now 583GB (GigaBytes) across all fixed broadband technologies (up from 531GB in 2024), which rises to an average of 738GB for full-fibre connections (actually down a bit from 766GB).
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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Fire Sticks becoming more popular then.
Completely separate topic to this one..
This was all around Amazon Prime Video Streaming the Semi Final
To be fair, IPTV does add to traffic. The real story is around the event I suppose.
That was my first thought as well, but I think it is not about this “Footy” streaming. However if I am wrong then people are reckless accessing it without VPN and DoH/DoT DNS.
Just to expand on what Jeanie York said: this is about spikes in streaming as broadcasting programmes like popular football matches causes zero added load on the network regardless of how many people watch these multicast streams. However for streaming it’s a different matter as each request causes a unicast stream which does add network load and could lead to congestion on the access (but not core) network if too many people are trying to watch the match over the ‘last mile’ of the network.
Mark referred to CDNs: if I had used Amazon’s Prime Video to watch the Arsenal v Atletico Madrid match on my Virgin Media TV 360 box, the content would have come from Amazon’s Cloudfront CDN and VM would have almost certainly got it from its private peering at Equinix in Slough (as I live in West London). There’s no network stress here as the ‘pipes’ are sized for peak loads but obviously carry a cost. If instead I were a Stream box user I’d have got the streams straight from VM over its closed network. But either way, the streams do impact on the access network.