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The UK is said to have had seen its highest use of broadband data ever on Tuesday, with telecommunications provider BT claiming that traffic peaked at around 18 terabits per second, beating the previous record of 17.5 Tbps.
The report comes by the way of BBC News, who speculate a combination of factors, including preloads for this week's launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the recent Destiny 2: Beyond Light expansion, the launch of Assassin's Creed Valhalla and, of course, the recent launch of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles.
The BBC also spoke to Virgin Media who sited 108 petabytes of data were consumed via their own networks, with 1pb being equivalent to a million GB, which it said was higher than the last busiest period reported which was in June during the launch of Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare Season 4. TalkTalk meanwhile reported a network traffic spike of 6.8Tbps, and Zen Internet claimed its own traffic was 11.6% higher than its own previous peak in October of this year.
It wasn't the same story across the board, however, with internet company Openreach—who provide much of the network infastructure behind many of the country's ISPs—claimed that from their numbers, Tuesday had been very high with 174PB of data being consumed, but not beating their record of 193PB from August 5, with the launch of Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare's Season 5, although their chief technology innovation officer Colin Lees did say "This far exceeds what we'd consider a normal Tuesday."
Of course, another jump in traffic is expected next week, when the PlayStation 5 launches over here. Let's hope our respective internet connections all hold up, eh? Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War launches this Friday on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4 and PC.