According to a report from the BBC, top internet providers across the UK experienced record broadband usages this week, in light of the new Xbox consoles, new titles, and large updates.
BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky, Vodafone, City Fibre, and Zen Internet were among the providers that recorded huge spikes in network traffic on Tuesday. The primary causes of the spike is cited as Activision’s new updates for Modern Warfare & Warzone, and pre-loads for Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (as large as 65 and 136GB’s respectively).
Other causes include the arrival of Destiny 2’s latest update (65GB) and a subsequent live event, to the release of Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (which included an 8GB day one update for physical copies), not to mention security updates and bug fixes from Microsoft.
According to BT, their broadband traffic peaked at 18 terabits per second, which is equivalent to 1,510 hours of high-definition video a second. To put this into context, a previous record had been set following a demand for streaming football and video games.
Virgin Media, meanwhile, recorded 108 petabytes of data that had been used by its network. In layman’s terms, 1PB equals one billion megabytes (MB), or one million gigabytes (GB).
This figure was 30% higher than its average for October. While TalkTalk’s traffic peaked at 6.8Tbps, Zen Internet’s peak was 11.6% higher than the last, recorded in October, whereas Vodafone’s spike was 8% higher than it’s last (set during the Champions League final on August 23).
Sky’s peak reached 16.6Tbps while Openreach, a provider of network infrastructure, recorded large spikes. In comparison to 193PB recorded on August 5 during the launch of Warzone Season 5, Openreach recorded only 174PB on Tuesday.
The Xbox Series X and Series X launched on November 10, with the PS5 launching yesterday (November 12) in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea. For the UK and the rest of the world, Sony’s next-gen console launches November 19.
