Broadband use up 45% in lockdown
BROADBAND internet use increased by 45% during lockdown, said Sure.
While peak usage – during the evenings when people would usually be at home – stayed more or less the same, the company’s local chief executive Justin Bellinger, pictured, said that the ‘tonnage’ saw that the peak stretched throughout the day as more islanders worked from home.
‘We have been absolutely thrilled at the way the network has held up,’ he said.
‘It’s been 100% stable throughout the whole period.’
One issue that seems to have become a thing of the past is problems with contention ratio, that is lots of people in an area accessing the internet at the same time.
Mr Bellinger said this is due to the island’s better connectivity in general: ‘I haven’t come across issues [with contention ratio],’ he said.
‘That comes back to the off-island capacity.’
Another boost to users is that Sure provides storage for Facebook, Apple and Netflix, so the most popular material is served to islanders from servers in Guernsey rather than the content having to be streamed from the UK, cutting down on delays and the buffering of popular films and TV programmes. While a lot of people off work were streaming TV programmes and films, there were many who took advantage of online video conferencing to enable them to work from home, with Zoom and Microsoft Teams probably the most popular of these programs: ‘We had more than 100 Teams calls a day and 6,000 message just with our staff,’ said Mr Bellinger.
