Call Of Duty: Warzone Triggers Discussions About Surging Internet Data Usage

Call of Duty: Warzone (Sumber: Call of Duty)

JAKARTA - Call of Duty broke the record for the biggest downloads in the day after they released the patch for the latest title, Call of Duty: Warzone. That day, February 25, users downloaded more than 20 GB.

That was just announced by Virgin Media, Friday, March 5. Call of Duty: Warzone is known for its large download sizes.

The last patch update alone reached 26.5 GB for some users. Apart from Virgin Media, BT confirmed how busy the download was that day. Even so, BT did not set a record on its network.

Unlike Virgin, BT provides data about the network as a whole rather than the average used by individual customers. BT explained the surge it is seeing is being driven by the Call of Duty patch and the streaming of four European soccer games.

The relation to the pandemic

The peak network traffic at that time was recorded as TB reaching 20.86 Tbps (Terabytes per second). Virgin, however, said that the traffic records reflected a constant increase since the first pandemic lockdown.

The first lockdown caused a sudden burst of activity on the home broadband network. This has sparked fears that the national network will not be able to handle it. The fear turned out to be unfounded as the system remained largely stable.

During the cold January and February weather, the usage was up 7.4 GB one day compared to the same month last year, pre-lockdown. But Virgin says the downloads are currently locked at the moment compared to the first in 2020, with the average user downloading an additional 3.1 GB a day.

Habits have also changed, with weekday afternoons between 2:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. being the busiest period for "upstream traffic". This information is based on an analysis of about five million broadband subscriber accounts.

One caveat is that the amount of data pushed through the country's broadband networks continues to grow as demand increases. Mark Jackson, editor of ISPreview, an industry site wrote that "the demand for data continues to increase so that new usage peaks are always being set

The usage typically increases by 30 percent or more each year. However, the COVID-19 lockdown has accelerated that trend as demand has shifted from offices to home broadband users. Apart from that, video calls, distance learning, and other high data usage have also increased.

The game's growth

Games also make a big contribution. Gamers download more titles they want to play than buy physical CDs.

In November, the launch of the new Xbox console helped set another record. Gamers at that time had to download the necessary data to move on to the games of the next generation.

Call of Duty: Warzone, a popular battle royale game is a widely recognized contributor to such download statistics. Imagine, each user must have 175 GB of free space to install this game.

PlayStation 4 owners have even been told they may need to delete some of the game's data plans themselves in order to download the new update and make it fit on the console's 500GB hard drive.

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