Openreach has announced that they saw the largest data peak ever recorded on their network yesterday. Between 8 and 9 pm on Wednesday 6th December 2023, it saw more than 29.5 petabytes of data pass through their broadband network. Their usual traffic levels at this time of day are around 21 petabytes, and they have put the large spike down to live streaming of six Premier League football matches.
To put this into perspective, the largest data size that most people will regularly see is terabytes and is used with data storage such as the hard drive within your computer or laptop. Hard drives can now often run into several terabytes, or may usually still be in gigabytes in home models. A computer with 500 gigabytes of storage would be 0.5 terabytes. There are 1000 terabytes in a petabyte, so 29.5 PB is 29,500 terabytes or 29.5 million gigabytes! That is a lot of data transferring in one hour!
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Said Premier League footie matches – all 6 of them – were shown on the Amazon Prime Video service.
Put another way, that’s somewhere around a decade worth of all NHS medical imaging (radiography) data – every X-ray, CT scan, MRI and the rest, for ten years, in a single hour. (It’s all distributed to varying extents, but the Scottish system is centralised and has about a tenth of that for about a tenth of the population, so I extrapolated.)