By Frank Dalleres
The top-of-the-table Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester City pushed UK broadband traffic to record levels last week, City A.M can reveal.
The eagerly anticipated fixture, which was only available to stream, helped traffic on the country’s biggest broadband network to reach a new peak of 29.1 terabits per second (Tb/s).
BT and EE said the release of a new Call of Duty game and two live Champions League fixtures, including Chelsea’s trip to Borussia Dortmund, also contributed to the surge on 15 February.
The broadband traffic easily beat the previous record of 25.2 Tb/s on the network, which was registered between 18 and 20 October last year.
As with Arsenal’s defeat to Manchester City, that was driven by demand to watch Premier League football that was only available in the UK to stream on Amazon Prime Video.
“As the quality and quantity of streaming traffic grows in the future – especially for live events – we must ensure we strike the right balance between investing in more capacity and efficiency of content delivery,” said Howard Watson, chief security and networks officer at BT Group.
“The latter is going to be key if we’re going to maintain and improve customers’ experience in the future.”
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