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TalkTalk break records for downloads with 557GB per sec on New Year’s Day

Trefor DaviesTalkTalk is a highly successful provider of communications services – broadband, phone lines etc. I noted an entry in the Twitter stream this morning that showed they had seen record traffic levels on New Year’s Day – people upgrading firmware on new gadgets, using the gadgets etc.

We know this because TalkTalk CTO Clive Dorsman blogged about their network peaking at 557GB per second of traffic – that’s around 4.45Terabits per second which is impressively massive and three times to peak usage seen on the LINX network. I can only dream of having that amount of capacity at Timico.

Clive goes on to sell TalkTalk broadband services in his post. That’s OK. I occasionally chuck in a reference to a Timico service (great value & service etc – check it out here). “TalkTalk Superfast Fibre Broadband … costs £10 per month for up to 38MB or £15 for up to 76MB, allowing downloads up to eight times faster than the UK average.”

The only tiny element of doubt I have about all this is that I don’t believe that FTTC speeds of 76 Megabytes are available. In fact the TalkTalk product pages correctly quote speeds of 76 Megabits per second.

I suspect that Clive’s post was written by a PR person new to the tech game. I guess these things happen. I’m sure we are all guilty of the occasional cock up.

Btw this is only a bit of fun but I attach a screenshot of the post here for reference in anticipation of the corrections to the TalkTalk blog and the pursuant challenge for me to provide evidence. Also if the real number is 4.45Terabits per second – as I said that is massively impressive.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

8 replies on “TalkTalk break records for downloads with 557GB per sec on New Year’s Day”

Not convinced. You sure the 577 isn’t Gbits/sec ? Seems unlikely they would be three times LINX somehow, even with peering to the Beeb etc.

With 4m subscribers, allegedly provided with below 100 kbits/s each of backhaul, capacity would be around 400 Gbits/s (4 million at 0.1 Mbits/s each) which seems like the 460 Gb/s quoted at http://www.talktalkblog.co.uk/2012/05/02/network-traffic-revs-up-as-premier-league-rivals-clash/

Put another way, 577 Gbytes per second sustained over 3 days is 25 GB per subscriber which is probably above the average TT user’s *monthly* usage.

As is often the case, saving a few characters abbreviating bits as b and bytes as B end up in wasted paragraphs of clarification 😉

btw the B & b mix up is an age old mistake & is typically done by people who have no idea there is a difference. Also I suspect there is a lesson in that high profile blogs should be written by the high profile people themselves and not delegated.

The B & b mix up does look to have struck here, but yet on some parts of the Blog they’ve actually gone an spelt out “gigabytes”. No doubt the PR people will be sat in one corner smiling and feeling pleased with their work, while the techies are finding a brick wall

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