New data sourced by Arbor Networks has revealed some interesting insights into the differences between broadband Internet usage habits in Europe and the US. Broadly both remain similar but unlike EU traffic, US daily Internet percentages take a small dip in the early evening.

To make some of these differences more obvious, Arbor shows European and North American traffic on a single daily timeline. In other words, 5am for European is 5am GMT and 5am for the US is 5am EDT. Note that the yellow shaded area represents daylight hours and the left side is percentage.


For those of you who just want to know when the best time to go online is (i.e. when all those North American's aren't hogging so much of the Internet's precious bandwidth), then this (below) is the chart you want. All times are EDT. The yellow shaded area represents daylight hours in Europe and the US:

•We all share the same morning and evening Internet addiction: On average, European traffic starts picking up around 5am GMT / 7 am CEST and similarly US traffic takes off around the same time at 7am EDT. Internet traffic also reaches its peaks in the early evening (7pm GMT / 9pm CEST in Europe and 10pm EDT / 7 pm PDT in the US).

•North American’s don’t surf over dinner: Unlike European traffic, US daily Internet percentages take a small dip in the early evening between 6pm and 10pm EDT. In contrast, Europe traffic keeps climbing through the evening until a marked 9pm GMT / 11pm CEST drop off. Of course, Europeans tend towards later (and longer) dinner hours than their North American counterparts.

•What Europeans do at night: Actually, this bullet point should be what Europeans don’t do at night — spend a lot of time on the Internet. In contrast to North America, European traffic plummets much more steeply and reaches a lower daily minimum than US traffic (US traffic never drops below 50% whereas Europe declines more more than 60% from its peak). Apparently, North American Internet users stay up later and use the Internet longer (next blog post we’ll explore what they’re doing on the Internet late at night).

It would be interesting to see how daily usage breaks down between each individual European country, although Arbor doesn't provide that information and it would probably still be quite similar anyway.