Coronavirus didn't hurt UK broadband speeds in March. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, on the other hand...
- Reference: 1589449510
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/14/broadband_speeds_uk_march/
- Source link:
On average, download speeds declined by just 2 per cent in the week immediately following the imposition of the UK-wide lockdown on 23 March, when compared to the week ending March 8.
There is, however, significant variation between providers, with some faring better than others.
The biggest fall was seen by users of Virgin Media, who saw speeds drop by around 10 per cent. Conversely, users of the BT-owned EE broadband saw speeds increase (very) slightly.
Upload speeds saw a similar drop of 1 per cent, although there was little variation between providers here. The biggest drops were experienced by users of EE and Virgin Media, who saw falls of roughly 2 per cent.
Keeping with this trend, Ofcom reports a small 2 per cent increase on average, with modest differences between broadband providers. Users of Virgin Media saw their pings spike by as much as 3.8 per cent, while latency increased by just 0.1 per cent on EE.
On March 20, three days before the lockdown was formally imposed, BT reported that weekday traffic on its network was up between 35 and 60 per cent.
Virgin Media reported similar numbers on March 23, following the closure of UK schools, with daytime download traffic up 90 per cent.
Ofcom attributes the resiliency shown by broadband providers to their ability to scale with demand.
By the halfway point of March, providers likely knew that a lockdown was coming, due to the public remarks of senior politicians, and the fact that stay-at-home orders had already been issued in nearby countries, like Italy, Ireland, and Spain.
In contrast, broadband performance can suffer when traffic unexpectedly surges, and providers are unable to implement contingencies.
This is beautifully illustrated by the data from March 10, when Infinity Ward released a mammoth 50GB patch for its popular Call of Duty: Modern Warfare first-person shooter game, causing download speeds to plunge by as much as 14 per cent on some providers, most notably KCOM. ®
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[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0038/194897/uk-home-broadband-performance.pdf
[2] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8578/how-to-build-your-digital-experience-portfolio?td=wptl1936
Virgin Media varies quite a lot by region
It depends heavily where you are what service you get with virgin media. Partially I'm told it's a function of their odd network topology in particular if you're former telewest or NTL. Another factor though is how over-subscribed your area is: they get no where near their advertised speed in south birmingham (where I am), but they're pretty good elsewhere
Mine has been all over the shop, so bad yesterday (~95% degradation) that I had to switch to mobile to resume a google hangout meeting
I've not had any problems though I'm now running out of cat videos to watch.
Cat videos aside, I did read that Netflix and Amazon Prime would be reducing their bitrates on HD and UHD movies (in Netflix's case, halving the rate of UHD from 15.25 to 7.62Mbps). They said they're doing this to 'help' people by reducing the load on internet providers to help Britain 'keep working' (or some such nonsense) as usage of these streaming services increases because people are at home. I found out later that actually Netflix and Amazon have costs associated with streaming, and they pay by the GB. They were probably concerned that their costs might increase by more than the number of new subscriptions.
So they're not doing this to help anyone, they're just looking to help themselves and reduce losses.
Anyway, all I can report is that the loss is really not visible with Netflix, either with UHD or HD movies. You don't see quite as much high-end detail in Netflix, but it's still very good. However, I've noticed that HD movies in Amazon Prime have lost so much quality that you see low-resolution artefacts and it's quite distracting.
Yeah? What about upload speeds.
My virgin upload speed is shit right now. Sub 1mb.
Every customer we've ever had who uses virgin has had problems since the day of install, and forever after. Generally it's OK but when it's bad, it's very bad and it happens too often.
"Ofcom attributes the resiliency ... to their ability to scale with demand."
"Ofcom attributes the resiliency shown by broadband providers to their ability to scale with demand."
I'd have thought it's more down to daytime not being the normal peak for domestic ISPs; no need to scale (much) if capacity is already (mostly) there.
Just curious.
BT claimed a load of between 35% to 60% then an increase of 90% - so does that mean they went to ~66.5% to ~114% load, or 125% to 150% (rated) load?
beliving the operators...
the stats come from BT and Virgin media routers... and I would bet not a entirely random sample nor include any outliers
personally I would have more faith on the tests here :
[1]https://speed.measurementlab.net/
what your experience of the above independent speed test ?
[1] https://speed.measurementlab.net/