Broadband ISP TalkTalk UK has revealed that the release of the Season 3 update for online video game Fortnite on 17th June 2020, as well as the combined return of the Premier League (Football), sent internet traffic over their network to its “second highest peak … this year” of 6.12Tbps (Terabits per second).

The update itself came in at only a shade over 2GB (GigaBytes) in size on the PC, but for whatever reason this jumps to just over 7GB on the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, while the XBox One’s update topped the table at a hefty 12GB.

NOTE: Direct comparisons of traffic between ISPs is tricky as some will have more business than consumer traffic, as well as different customer totals and product splits.

The latest peak comes less than a week after TalkTalk registered the “highest-ever level of internet traffic” on its network after the release of Call of Duty Season 4 on Friday. At its peak the ISP saw a spike of 6.488Tbps, although it should be said that this pales in comparison to BT’s peak of 17.5Tbps during the COVID-19 crisis, but then they do have more than double the customers.

Gary Steen, TalkTalk’s MD of Technology, Change and Security, said:

“We know how important having a super fast, reliable internet connection is to our gaming customers and TalkTalk’s unlimited fibre broadband packages deliver just that. We have been investing significantly in our Network over the years to optimise both speeds and capacity and we are very well prepared for surges in demand just like this.”

All our packages are totally unlimited, which means there aren’t any usage caps, extra charges or speed reductions – even at peak times. So our customers can game as hard as they want, for as long as they want, even with the return of the Premier League and much of the UK still working from home.”

You can also see a fairly mild peak by looking at the general traffic flowing over switches at the London Internet Exchange (LINX), which is used by hundreds of providers across the United Kingdom and recorded a peak of 4.71Tbps at midday on 17th June – the highest of the week. But LINX have gone a little over the 5Tbps mark before, so this isn’t a record.

We should point out that demand for data is constantly rising and so new peaks of usage are being set all the time, but every once in awhile it’s interesting to look at specific events. Most ISPs also employ Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to help manage the load from such events, which caches common content closer to end-users (i.e. improves performance without network strain) and lowers their impact on external links.