Football World Cup England match creates broadband traffic spike

One would normally expect that England football World Cup matches would have people turn on the television, but with the England vs Iran match starting at 1pm there is obviously a lot of people at work or even if working from home not able to work in front of their own TV.

The LINX traffic stats show that data use through the interchange started to grow at around 12:30pm and similar can be seen on the LONAP traffic flow charts.

At the time of writing we are in the second half at 58 minutes with 32 minutes until the full time whistle. Whether broadband providers will be reporting new traffic records like we did for an evening a month ago when five Premier League matches were streamed by Amazon Prime is an unknown at this point in time.

The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 is mired with questions over LGBTQ rights amongst many other aspects for the small country playing host and the England captain had originally planned to wear a OneLove armband, but after FIFA said the penalty would change from a fine to a yellow card the FA and other associations appears to have backed out. 

Update 3:30pm: Final result is in and the peak on LINX was 7.424 Tbps (Terabits per second) at 3:10pm and prior to the start of the spike traffic was running at around 6.1 to 6.3 Tbps. So looks likely that the traffic was around 1.1 to 1.2 Tbps (1100 to 1200 Gbps), equivalent to around 400,000 individual 3 Mbps video streams. Remember LINX traffic will be a fraction of the total traffic for an event since not not all UK traffic goes via sites like LINX or LONAP.  

Update Tuesday 22nd November: The Wales vs USA match at 7pm did not create a readily identifiable peak, the two main reasons are the smaller population of Wales and the kick-off time of 7pm meant a lot more people were able to watch on their TV at home. There was a peak around 7:45pm but there is often a weekday evening spike at this time as the majority of people are home from work/school.