Vodafone has seen six months of forecast network demand growth emerge in the past four weeks in Europe, following the adoption of self-distancing and lockdown measures by most countries to control the spread of coronavirus. In its latest update on traffic recorded on its European fixed and mobile broadband networks, Vodafone said average fixed downstream traffic has increased by 44 percent throughout the continent, with upstream rising by as much as 100 percent in some markets. Italy and Spain, two of the first European countries to introduce containment policies, saw their fixed broadband usage surge by more than 50 percent due above all to more videoconferencing and video streaming.
Overall mobile data usage has increased around 15 percent across Vodafone’s European networks in recent weeks, peaking at 30 percent in Spain and Italy, where workers and entrepreneurs have been offered unlimited data to mitigate the effects of the lockdown. The operator said there are still large differences between countries, with traffic in Germany and the UK staying broadly unchanged.
Streaming traffic has increased by 40 percent on mobile and 50 percent on fixed broadband across Vodafone’s European networks as a whole, with gaming traffic alone rising twofold on mobile and nearly threefold on fixed broadband. The operator added that surges of 35 percent and 20 percent in fixed and mobile peaks in Italy and Spain have put the respective networks near capacity during some parts of the evening.
