Posted: 07th May, 2010 By: MarkJ

Several UK ISPs have unsurprisingly reported a huge jump in broadband usage today, especially from internet video streaming services, with many people going online to view coverage of yesterdays 2010 General Election results; often from their places of work. Eclipse Internet in particular are claiming a 400% surge in traffic!
Clodagh Murphy, director of Eclipse Internet, commented:
"In what’s been one the most controversial elections the UK has seen, it’s clear that UK voters are desperate to see what the outcome is and are turning online at work to do so. Clearly, the outcome of the election is of real interest for businesses across the UK, so people at work are keen to watch closely what unfolds and the live streaming online allows this."
In addition Eclipse reported a 200% increase in online activity last night, compared to normal figures, as voters tuned in to see whether Brown, Clegg or Cameron would come out on top. The increase was not reflected to the same extent by everybody, with business ISP Timico seeing a more modest rise.
Trefor Davies, Chief Technology Officer of Timico, said:
"Noon-time traffic on Timico’s ADSL network is up approx 23% on the same time yesterday. This percentage seems to be reasonably constant for all major online events. Similar burst have been seen in the past for the Olympics, the Ashes Cricket, US President Obama’s inauguration and the last budget speech. Video streaming almost exclusively accounts for the increase today."
We note that several popular news websites, such as for Sky, have also been playing a live video stream from the moment you load their page(s). This could well have been contributing to the rises reported above.