Our powerful network delivers the goods over the holiday season

Santa delivered a lot of gadgets this year, so many of you will be settling into the New Year with a new device to hand that enables you to search, watch, shop, play…whatever your heart desires. As the dust settled after the festive period, people were connecting their new toys to our network in their droves and the traffic passing through our network shot up as a result.

So much so, in fact, that Sunday, 5th January was the busiest day EVER for our superfast fibre-optic network, with more than 11,500 Terabytes of traffic (or 11.55 Petabytes, for those who know about mega data numbers!) delivered to customers’ homes in 24 hours, peaking between 8pm and 9pm that evening. This is equivalent to our customers downloading 2.8 million HD movies or 1.9 billion music tracks in just one day!

Our record-breaking Sunday followed a busy festive period, with New Year’s Day seeing a peak of 1.62Tbps. Yes, that’s 1.62 Terabits per second, which is around 60% more than the peak we saw last year. That day, our network carried a staggering total of eleven thousand Terabytes (11 Petabytes) of traffic to our customers in 24 hours.

On Christmas Day, we saw a 55% increase in usage across the day compared to last year. Demand peaked around 9pm at 1.2Tbps, which is 58% higher than the peak of Christmas Day in 2012.

And it wasn’t just in British living rooms that our network kept everyone connected. On New Year’s Eve, 80,000 people used our WiFi network on the London Underground, delivering 600,000 Tweets, Facebook posts, web pages and emails with traffic peaking at 1.04am.

This record-breaking festive frenzy goes to show that the UK’s appetite for data and connectivity just keeps on growing!  And our powerful network delivers, giving more families with more devices the data they need – fast.