BT Reveals Broadband Traffic Stats for England v Argentina Match
The latest data from broadband ISP BT (EE) has revealed that Wednesday’s night’s semi-final FIFA World Cup 2026 football match between England and Argentina triggered the “largest live streaming event ever seen” on the internet provider’s national network.
Streaming traffic is said to have exceeded BT’s previous record by nearly 30%, driven in part by customers tuning in via the BBC’s exclusive 4K iPlayer viewing experience. The record came during a tournament in which England’s matches generated significant increases in traffic through both BBC iPlayer and ITVX, although outside of streaming they didn’t have a dramatic impact.
BT compared the peak streaming traffic during each match with the peak recorded during the equivalent time window in an average week. The analysis found increases ranging from 160% to 683%, with Mexico v England producing the largest proportional uplift.
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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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Hohum, what is the point of BT(EE) providing graphs based on percentages?
Look how good our network is, it can spin up to 683% with Mexico/England.
But only 221% for England/Argentina.
But the bargraph is larger….. just so much is wrong with that Powerpointless slide.
Is this news? When iPlayer is streaming the Semi-Final it’s traffic goes up.
What BT should share is how it compares to overall traffic. Was total traffic lower because everyone was watching the game? Did it remain the same because if they weren’t streaming iPlayer, they would have been streaming Netflix anyway?