BROADBAND usage in the UK more than doubled in 2020 as millions of people worked, socialised and studied from home because of the pandemic.
The new figures from broadband network Openreach - which is used by customers of BT, Plusnet, Sky, TalkTalk, and Zen - said data consumption rose from 22,000 Petabytes (PB) last year to 50,000 PB in 2020.
A single Petabyte is equivalent to 1025 Terabytes, or 1,048,576 Gigabytes.
The amount of data used by people in the UK in 2020 is enough to stream movies in standard definition continuously for around 52,428,800,000 hours, or almost 6 million years.
During the year, the daily record for broadband use was broken 15 times, Openreach said, as home working and video conferencing increased as people stayed inside because of Covid.
The network also highlighted increases in live sports streaming, video streaming for entertainment purposes, and large update downloads for video games and their consoles, in a year when the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X launched.
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Boxing Day was named the busiest day of the year for broadband - when a record 210 PB was consumed across Openreach's networks.
The company said this was down to increased numbers of video calls as friends and family got in touch, as well as TV and video game streaming.
Colin Lees, chief technology and information officer at Openreach, said: "It's been a year unlike any other and we believe that's played a major part in this huge jump in data consumption.
"We know more businesses asked their employees to work from home throughout most of 2020, so connecting remotely has been and continues to be important for everyone.
"January and February saw data consumption at around 2700PB per month - before the pandemic brought about a big increase - with most months at more than 4000PB - for the rest of the year.
"In terms of capacity, our network has coped well during the pandemic. We have a team of tech experts working hard behind-the scenes to make sure there's enough network capacity for every eventuality.
"They're constantly preparing for things such as major retail events like Black Friday or the release of the latest big ticket TV and film titles on streaming services like Netflix and Amazon."
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