Vodafone says upstream broadband data flows have doubled in some markets

Operator group Vodafone has shared an update on changes to activity across its European networks coz of Coronavirus.

Apparently a fifth of global internet traffic goes over Vodafone’s networks, so it has a fairly comprehensive view of what’s going on in certain regions. Principal among those is Europe and Vodafone says mobile data usage has increased by 15% on average across the continent. The more advanced the pandemic is, the more mobile data use has increased, so Italy and Spain are the main drivers of that increase.

A similar, but more exaggerated, pattern applies to fixed-line broadband, with Italy and Spain showing a 50% increase in usage. While streaming video will account for a lot of that, the most extreme changes have been caused by video conferencing, which is why upstream (originating from the user) data has increased by 100% in some markets.

“The biggest user of bandwidth on our networks is still the streaming of TV, film and games. Streaming traffic has increased by 40% on mobile and 50% on fixed broadband across European networks as a whole,” blogged Johan Wibergh, Vodafone group CTO. “Gaming traffic alone has increased twofold on mobile and nearly threefold on fixed broadband.

“This has put our mobile and fixed networks under strong pressure with evening peaks for mobile increasing by 20% in countries like Italy and Spain and fixed broadband traffic by around 35% in those countries, putting them near capacity during some parts of the evening. We have therefore brought forward planned upgrades to add four Terabits per second of additional capacity to our networks during March and April.”

Vodafone’s metrics tally with those published recently by Nokia. Operators and networking vendors alike are keen to stress how on top of the unique circumstances they are, but then again would they be blogging about it if they weren’t? Having said that there have been few reports of network problems that we’re aware of and our evening viewing of Tiger King yesterday went without a hitch, so what more could you ask for?