BT's Chief Technology and Information Officer, Howard Watson has shared how its fixed network is coping with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic with more people now working from home.
On the fixed network, the highest peak in evening traffic was 17.5Tb/s, driven by videogame updates and streaming football. In contrast, daytime usage, during working hours, generally runs at about 5 Tb/s. Since Tuesday last week, as people started to work from home more extensively, the weekday daytime traffic increase 35-60% compared with similar days on the fixed network, peaking at 7.5Tb/s.
However, BT is seeing a 5% decrease in mobile data traffic, as a lot of people are connecting their mobiles to their home WiFi, rather than using the cellular network. Data usage is peaking at around 5PM, the time of the Prime Minister’s daily briefing. Mobile traffic is becoming more evenly distributed across the country, as people travel into urban hubs less frequently. Roaming traffic is falling by about 10% per day, with a 55% drop over the last 5 days, according to the Operator.
Howard Watson said, "The UK’s fixed broadband network core is built (with a lot of ‘headroom’) to support the ‘evening peak’ of network traffic, driven by these high-bandwidth applications."
He assured that they are monitoring the network closely, and collaborating with the other UK networks and content companies. BT's Network Operations Centre teams are operating around the clock to identify any issues and resolve them as rapidly as possible.
