Sport and lockdown boosts broadband traffic in 2021

Sporting fixtures streamed online and continued working from home saw broadband traffic in the UK increase by 20 per cent in 2021.

The figure comes from Openreach, which runs the cables that BT, Sky, Talktalk and Vodafone use to provide broadband for more than 17 million premises.

Its annual review shows that people in the UK downloaded 62,000 petabytes (PB) of data in 2021, up from 50,000 in 2020. One petabyte is equal to 1,000 terabytes, or one million gigabytes.

It would take one person over 870,000 years to use this much data, even if they downloaded 12 HD films every day. The average household consumed 3,666 gigabytes, equivalent to around 10GB every day.

2021’s busiest month was January, as the Government announced a third lockdown that closed schools and forced millions to work from home.

But the busiest day of all was Sunday 5 December, hitting a record 222PB, when bad weather and the spread of the Omicron variant kept people indoors streaming films and playing games.

The second busiest day was Tuesday 28 December, a Bank Holiday, when Amazon Prime streamed live four Premier League football matches.

Other busy days included weekends in February as viewers still in lockdown watched Six Nations rugby matches. Peak times for broadband use remain between 9pm and 10pm at weekends.

However, the increase in traffic throughout 2021 was actually smaller than from 2019 to 2020, when it more than doubled from 22,000 to 50,000 petabytes. This increase was driven by the sudden shift to home working and schooling when the Government announced the first lockdown.