Data: Call of Duty sets record broadband spike
April 29, 2022
Virgin Media O2 has seen its biggest gaming traffic spike on record, following the release of Call of Duty: Warzone Season 3 and Modern Warfare updates on April 27th.
During the evening peak period between 8-10pm, traffic was up 11.9 per cent on average and up 23.8 per cent on the previous week, as gamers rushed to download the latest update.
Over the course of the evening (4pm-12am), the average Virgin Media user consumed 12.1GB of data, up nearly a third (29 per cent) on the previous week.
The spike was the busiest day of the year on Virgin Media’s network, and the second biggest on record – following only December 28th 2021, when the country was battling the Omicron wave and six Premier League games were being simultaneously streamed live on Prime Video.
Since it launched two years ago, Call of Duty: Warzone has continued to smash traffic records and drive huge spikes on Virgin Media O2’s network. In 2021, Call of Duty: Warzone helped drive Virgin Media’s biggest download day on record at the time, where the average user downloaded more than 20GB of data in a single day and in 2020, Call of Duty: Warzone Season 5 patch caused a 60 per cent uplift in traffic on August 5th.
Jeanie York, Chief Technology Officer at Virgin Media O2, said: “With Triple-A games studios continuing to issue huge updates, and customers racing to get their hands on the latest releases, the growth in network traffic we saw during lockdown is here to stay: 2022 is set to be another record-breaking year for data usage. Call of Duty has once again driven a surge in demand and we’ve seen broadband traffic skyrocket, but with gigabit speeds available across our entire network, our customers are perfectly placed to download the newest games ahead of anyone else and keep their squad ahead of the pack.”