Data Traffic - Every day is like Sunday

For the last week or so Chorus has issued a daily update on the data traffic passing through its network. After an initial surge when large numbers of people began working from home, things have settled into a pattern.

It’s the new normal. As Spark’s technology director Mark Beder points out, weekday data use now looks the way weekend’s looked before the lock down. Weekend peaks are now higher again.

Spark says the amount of data on its network has doubled since widespread remote working started. Data peaks are about 27 percent higher than before the pandemic arrived.

Peak mobile traffic is up 22 percent. The company says it has seen some congestion at times and is working on adding capacity.

Call of Duty update

An update to the Call of Duty game on the first weekend of the lockdown period caused what Spark technology director Mark Beder describes as a “massive spike”.

Away from Spark, Tuesday evening saw traffic peak at 2.70Tbps on the Chorus network. There was an update to the Fortnite game during the evening which may have accounted for the extra traffic. The busiest midday this week was Wednesday with 1.72Tbps.

Both Ultrafast Broadband and Enable Networks have registered similar increases. UFF says it now sees about double the amount of pre-lockdown data.

Traffic well within capacity, for now

The Chorus figures are well within the network’s capacity limits. In the run-up to last year’s Rugby World Cup, which was streamed by Spark Sport, Chorus and most of the rest of the broadband industry brought forward capacity upgrades by 18 months or so.

Today the network is built to cope with 3.5Tbps. That’s comfortably above the peaks we are seeing at the moment. Traffic could go higher again when school and university terms restart, but there appears to be more than enough headroom to cope.