The UK’s largest broadband provider is expecting demand to hit a new high on Boxing Day.
BT is primed for peak internet traffic to exceed that seen on 6 December, when six Premier League games and an update for the new Call Of Duty saw customers guzzle 31 terabits of data a second.
There are another five top-flight football fixtures on Boxing Day, again all to be streamed online by Amazon, while gadgets and video games gifted for Christmas are set to result in a download spike.
On Boxing Day 2022, peak traffic hit just over 23 terabits per second, while traffic over the day was 141 petabytes (that’s a lot of data, one petabyte is one million gigabytes).
Chris Bramley, a managing director at BT, told Sky News: “When you see things like major gaming downloads coinciding with big football events, that’s when you see the biggest peaks.”
New figures released this week by Ofcom showed full-fibre broadband is available to more than 17 million homes across the UK, which equates to 57% of households – up on last year’s 42% and further increasing network activity.
Christmas demand is boosted by the fact an increasing amount of tech we unwrap isn’t ready to use straight away.
Everything from phones and tablets to doorbell cameras and video games usually require updates, meaning lots of waiting for downloads to finish before you can enjoy your gifts.
Add in your festive Spotify playlists, Christmas films to stream, and video calls with far-off family, it’s no surprise a Virgin Media O2 survey found half of Britons believe bad internet would dampen the holiday season.
Read more:
I got AI to help plan my Christmas
Need gift ideas? Handhelds are bigger than ever
With that in mind, here’s some advice on how to improve your broadband’s performance this Christmas.
Don’t block your router
Putting large items in front of your router, like a sofa or other coffee table, can block the Wi-Fi signal.
This advice is doubly important at Christmas time, when…
More information about this article Read More
Source: news.sky.com
This notice was published: 2023-12-20 00:01:00
Sky News is a British 24-hour information television channel, the first in Europe of its kind, launched on February 5, 1989 by the British Sky Broadcasting Company.