Broadband ISP PlusNet UK have been keeping a very close eye on recent trends with its customers consumption of internet traffic and has discovered that football matches, specifically those that feature Manchester United FC, are by far the most popular (i.e. biggest bandwidth hogs).

In particular the recent Manchester Derby, which is the name given to any footy games that occur between Manchester City FC and Manchester United FC, resulted in the largest single traffic surge to 2.6Gbps (Gigabits per second). By contrast ManU vs Chelsea ate 2.2Gbps and Liverpool vs ManU gobbled 2Gbps.


Most of the traffic came from customers watching the game(s) through legal internet video streaming services, such as BSkyB's Sky Player online TV solution. PlusNet also notes that 2% of all global tweets (Twitter) were talking about the ManU match. We won't mention the score line :wink: .