Sporting fixtures streamed online and continued working from home saw broadband traffic in the UK increase by 20 per cent in 2021.
The figure comes from Openreach, which runs the cables that BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone use to provide broadband for more than 17 million premises.
Its annual review shows that people in the UK downloaded 62,000 petabytes (PB) of data in 2021, up from 50,000 in 2020. One petabyte is equal to 1,000 terabytes, or one million gigabytes.
It would take one person over 870,000 years to use this much data, even if they downloaded 12 HD films every day. The average household consumed 3,666 gigabytes, equivalent to around 10GB every day.
2021’s busiest month was January, as the Government announced a third lockdown that closed schools and…