Posted: 25th Oct, 2011 By: MarkJ


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.
Plusnet's Ben Trimble said:
"A check of the week’s total bandwidth shows that whilst the extra traffic was noticeable, it’s only a small blip compared to the total amount used by our customers that day and kept us well within tolerance, with around 10Gbps spare.
The network performed very well over the weekend without any breaches of our tolerance for latency so broadband phone calls, streaming video and VoIP services retained excellent performance."
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: .