2nd December 2021: TalkTalk has recorded its highest ever peak in network traffic, as football fans watched the Watford v Chelsea, Southampton v Leicester, West Ham v Brighton, Wolves v Burnley, Aston Villa v Man City and Everton v Liverpool Premier League matches streaming on Amazon last night.
At around 9pm on Wednesday 1st December, TalkTalk recorded a network traffic peak of 8.1Tbps – the equivalent of downloading 336 Netflix HD movies per second. That’s leagues ahead of the previous record of 7.6Tb/s back in December 2020, on another day when matches were being streamed on top of gaming updates. For comparison, a peak of 7.6Tb/s is equivalent to streaming 636.4 hours of video in HD.
This latest peak comes after a year of surging online traffic. Increased working from home, online learning and at-home entertainment contributed to a 44% rise in internet usage over the pandemic, demonstrating our increased reliance on home connectivity.
Phil Haslam, Chief Technology Officer at TalkTalk, said: “Last night’s network peak demonstrates that our appetite for data (and great sport) is showing no signs of slowing down.
“When Amazon Prime streams football matches, it adds a big surge in demand on our network. That’s because our customers stream the action in real time, and Amazon Prime show multiple games simultaneously so more people watch at once. The last thing any fan wants is to miss their team score, so our brilliant engineering teams worked through the night this week to make sure our network ran smoothly. That work paid off. With hybrid working, online gaming and video streaming still on the rise, we’re continually optimising our network to cope with this increased demand.”