UK broadband usage more than doubled in 2020 and peaked on Boxing Day

UK broadband usage more than doubled in 2020, largely due to home working in lockdown, live-streamed sport and updates to video games such as Call of Duty, a new report reveals. One petabyte equals one million gigabytes (GB). On average a 4K film stream uses about 7.2GB per hour. Boxing Day was named the busiest day of the year for broadband – when a record 210PB was consumed across Openreach's networks – due to a combination of video calls to catch up with family and the lure of online entertainment. This year, network usage on Christmas Day was nearly double that of last year – 181PB compared with 96PB.