Record KCOM data usage at Christmas in the region
CHRISTMAS was the season to be merry online, according to KCOM, as record levels of web traffic were recorded.
The broadband provider has revealed a huge surge in gaming use during the festive period as people plugged in new consoles, smashing all previous records.
On Christmas Day alone, Xbox updates accounted for 45 per cent of all traffic on KCOM’S full fibre network with a whopping 259 Tebibits (TIB) of data downloads for the games console.
That’s the equivalent to more than 95,000 Netflix episodes, 1.3 million hours of Youtube videos or more than 59 million standard MP3 tracks.
Traffic from new Playstation downloads were a close second, ith 224.3TIB of traffic showing how dominant console gaming has become as an online activity in many homes.
Tim Shaw, managing director of Kcom wholesale and networks, said: “These are truly mindblowing numbers that show just show how integral online activities such as gaming and streaming are to our everyday lives now especially over Christmas when huge numbers of people were at home, unwrapping new games consoles and looking for entertainment on Netflix, Amazon and others.
“We store ‘caches’ of popular content for platforms such as Netflix, Youtube and iplayer on our own local network, meaning it can be delivered directly to customers without having to pass through slow external networks outside of Hull and East Yorkshire. That means we’re well placed to deliver services online and give our customers what they want, when they want it, with minimal disruption.”
Total traffic over Christmas Day and Boxing Day weighed in at a whopping 4,682TIB, the data equivalent of 40 million hours of streaming music on Spotify.
Streaming shows from providers such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney Plus also proved popular with data being downloaded at a peak of 132Gbps on Christmas Day and 180Gbps on Boxing Day.
Boxing Day was 33 per cent busier online than the same day last year while the record for online streaming came on Wednesday, December 30, when it reached a peak of 404 Gbps as customers settled in front of their TVS to watch football on Amazon.