Gamers Brought UK Broadband To Its Knees Yesterday, Smashing Download Records
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Featured Image Credit: Activision / Microsoft
The UK's internet providers found themselves a little overworked yesterday as the new Xbox consoles and the pre-loads of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War landed, as well as a massive update to Destiny 2. Two of the biggest launches of 2020 coincided in a way that demanded a huge amount of broadband from all of the biggest internet providers.
As reported by the BBC, the swell in internet usage was caused by many gamers downloading large files. Of course, we'll all very familiar with the fact that the Call of Duty games require a lot of memory, we don't need reminding - but added to file transfers and updates for the new Xbox Series X and S, and you have a huge surge in broadband usage.
BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Vodafone, City Fibre, and Zen Internet all reported a massive spike in usage. BT reported that its traffic peak record of 17.5 terabits per second was broken as yesterday's spike reached 18tbs. The report says that amounts to about 1,510 hours of HD video being delivered every second.
The BBC collates a variety of numbers which really puts the amount of broadband we needed yesterday into perceptive. First the Modern Warfare and Warzone updates ranging up to 65 gigabytes, then Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War pre-loads managed another 130 GB on top of that. That's a lot of CoD.
The Destiny 2 update ran up another 65GB of memory and those of us getting into Assasin's Creed Valhalla faced 60GB to download. And those are just some of the big games. Xbox's backwards compatibility meant that anything and everyone you wanted to be on your console could be downloaded which meant a bunch more downloads.
Well, we'd tell internet providers to be ready for the second wave of downloads that will arrive when the PlayStation 5 drops in the UK on November 19. Be ready BT, be ready.
Topics: Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, News
