Increased Broadband Demand During Corona Virus

UK broadband service providers report an increased demand in services as more people choose to stay indoors amidst coronavirus crisis.

05:06 18 March 2020

Internet service providers in the United Kingdom have seen a sudden increase in demand in their services as many people are forced to stay indoors amidst the coronavirus crisis. ISPs assured users that contingency plans are in place and that their network can deal with extra daytime demand. 

 

Openreach, which runs much of the UK's infrastructure, said: “As an example, the Liverpool versus Everton match, which was streamed live by Amazon Prime in December, drove significant peaks in traffic over our network without causing any major issues for our customers," it said.

 

Mark Jackson, editor of ISP Review, said: "Nobody should expect broadband to crash or anything like that,"

 

He added: "Some slowdown in speed during periods of truly heavy usage is possible. I'd expect this to be fairly limited, and that's true even in normal times."

 

BT's chief technology officer, Howard Watson, said: "We have more than enough capacity in our UK broadband network to handle mass-scale homeworking.

 

"Even if the same heavy data traffic that we see each evening were to run throughout the daytime, there is still enough capacity for work applications to run simultaneously."