Rochdale-base broadband ISP Zen Internet has revealed that they saw their busiest ever period for network traffic on 4th December 2024, when streaming of live Premier League Football caused usage on their network to peak at 17% higher than 2023’s record and 10% above the average for a typical December evening. This was a 4% increase over their previous record high in September 2024.

Reinforcing the football connection, October’s traffic figures also show that the largest peak for that month occurred on Tuesday 1st, another live Champions League night on Amazon Prime. In that case, Arsenal vs Paris St. Germain helped drive an 11.95% increase in traffic over the previous day.

In addition to football, several other major events also contributed to notable spikes in Zen’s network activity. For example, daytime traffic soared over 20% above average on 2nd November 2024 as floods in Valencia and Kemi Badenoch’s election as Conservative Party leader dominated the UK news cycle. The conflict in Gaza also produced a sharp rise on 9th July 2024, due to heightened engagement with news sites and social media.

Zen also indicates that 2024’s network patterns may be reflecting a “shift away from video games and gaming-related content as dominant traffic drivers“. Unlike in previous years, “no significant peaks” were attributed by Zen to game launches, “likely due to staggered release strategies prioritising pre-orders and phased rollouts“.

Zen CEO, Richard Tang, said:

“This trend of surging traffic during Amazon’s live football broadcasts underscores their widespread appeal. Matches available to Amazon Prime subscribers at no additional cost draw far larger audiences than traditional pay-per-view options, solidifying live sports as a major driver of network demand.

Conversely, England’s advance to the final of the European Championships (Euros) this summer barely moved the dial on Zen’s network statistics. It seems that most people still prefer to watch football on terrestrial channels when it’s possible to do so, even when streaming is also available.”

Zen’s review of its 2024 network usage also highlights a consistent growth in internet traffic throughout the 12-month period, reflecting the global trend of increased internet usage (Cloudflare found global internet traffic grew 17.2% in 2024), while it also marked surpassing 200,000 broadband subscribers in April 2024.

December’s average usage was also found to be 6.4% higher than November’s, which Zen said reflected the seasonal impact of longer nights and colder weather. Yet even summer saw significant increases, such as on 13th June, when Zen’s network usage exceeded 2023’s highest peak by 5.4%.

Similarly, Ofcom recently reported that the average monthly data usage is now 531GB (GigaBytes) per connection across “all technologies“, which rises to an average of 766GB when only looking at full-fibre connections. However, due to a change in the regulator’s methodology, we can’t compare this with the previous year’s results.

Finally, it’s worth remembering that broadband and mobile providers use sophisticated Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and systems to help manage the load from big online events, which caches popular content closer in the network to end-users (i.e. improves performance without adding network strain). This in turn lowers the provider’s impact on external links and helps to keep costs down. Demand for data is of course constantly rising and home broadband connections are forever getting faster, thus new peaks of usage are being set all the time by every ISP.