Why some customers experienced slow internet last night across the UK?

Record Traffic Last Night:

Last night, many customers were affected by slow internet issues across the UK.

We were also notified by a few residents, that they experienced slower download speeds for about 30minutes. BT announced record traffic on their fixed broadband ISP network with a new peak of 30.1Tbps (Terabits per second) last night at around 9pm, which is up from around 28Tbps last year and 25Tbps in 2021. The picture above, taken from ISPreview.co.uk, courtesy of BT, shows this peak last night. For those that are unfamiliar, 1 Tbps is equivalent to 1 Million Mbps (1,000,000Mbps), and since most of our subscribers have 100Mbps to 1Gbps service, you can't really fathom how much traffic that was. If you include all the other providers including ourselves, this sets a new record of internet traffic for the UK, as reported by the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which is the main data hub for all traffic coming in/out of the UK to the rest of the world.

What Contributed to the Traffic Surge:

Part of the traffic was due to the fact that six Premier League Football games were all being streamed live via Amazon Prime video services, and Amazon Prime will continue to stream the majority of the Christmas fixtures, this festive period via their streaming services. Another reason was that a major update was released for the popular Call of Duty Modern Warfare video game (actually it was an update for both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone). This is an addition to the heavy traffic originating from last Sunday when another mega-popular game Fortnite Chapter 5 (video game update) was released. With these gaming servers being accessed for 15-25GB (GigaByte) downloads to each user across multiple platforms (PC, PlayStation, XBox etc.), it causes massive demand on the networks across the UK.

What it means for you?

If you are already subscribed to our service, when these major global traffic events happen, you may notice a difference, as when there is so much demand, it affects all the networks across the country! If you are on copper based ISP services; Sky, Vodafone, BT, TalkTalk, Plusnet etc.., your service experience will be much worse, as your speed of service is already at a disadvantage versus full fibre. The average consumption of data per household in the UK in 2022 was 462 Gigabytes of Data according to Ofcom. This has been increasing 6% year on year, so the higher the speed package you have the better your service will tolerate any outside impact or data download usage, and the reason why Fibre becomes critical for your service.

Since we offer unlimited data on our packages, you can be rest assured that we have enough capacity on our network to support downloads of the current gaming releases, or future releases, especially around Christmas Day/Boxing Day, when many customers have new consoles as Christmas presents that are opened, connected & customers download a huge proportion of traffic. Also, as our service is symmetrical, if you do any data uploads, our service is much faster than all the other providers, as we offer up to 1Gbps upload speed. Plus, with all the special video content over the festive period on Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, TNT Sports, Apple TV+, Paramount, BBCiPlayer etc.. it will also cause a surge in Internet usage, so if you are on copper your service will be more strained versus those on real fibre. Note, any real fibre provider that says they are providing you with fibre should offer at least 100Mbps speed, and the better of those providers offer symmetrical services to 1Gbps.

If you want to get connected, We are now live across Grayshott, as well as in Hindhead & Beacon Hill, and are taking orders for these areas now, for connections in Jan/Feb 2024. If you want connection before the New Year, we have limited spaces available, so please contact us.

If you are an existing customer, and want a speed boost, contact us for special offers. And if you are an existing customer we are also doing free Wi-Fi site surveys to optimise your Wi-Fi experience, so contact us to help with any Wi-Fi issues you may have, and let us get you connected to our new GigabitIQ app.