One-Year Anniversary of Pandemic Reveals Internet Usage Trends

As our nation marks the one-year anniversary of the widespread pandemic stay-at-home shift, 2020 traffic patterns reveal a sharp traffic surge in March and April, particularly in the Puget Sound region which became a “testing ground” for how home broadband networks would hold up nationwide. But as the year continued, what followed was a transition into a more typical – although still elevated – growth trend throughout the balance of 2020.

2020 at a glance:

• Peak Internet traffic rose 32 percent over pre-pandemic levels, and over 50 percent in some markets like the Puget Sound region in March.
• Peak downstream traffic in 2020 increased approximately 38 percent over 2019 levels and peak upstream traffic increased approximately 56 percent over 2019 levels.
• Despite the growth in upstream traffic, traffic patterns remained highly asymmetrical, as downstream traffic volumes were 14x higher than upstream traffic volumes throughout 2020.
• In the span of 4 months in the wake of pandemic lockdowns, Comcast’s network experienced almost 2 years-worth of traffic growth.
• Surprisingly, despite increases in videoconferencing activity, entertainment activities continued to dominate network traffic, with video streaming accounting for 71 percent of all downstream traffic and growing by 70 percent over 2019 levels.
• Other key drivers of downstream traffic in 2020 were online gaming and the accompanying software downloads (10 percent), and web browsing (8 percent).
• Despite growth in videoconferencing traffic, it still only accounted for less than 5 percent of overall network usage.
• For the first time ever, as Comcast customers surfed, streamed and emailed more than ever before, they generated more than a trillion Internet requests (DNS lookups) each day.

The Internet was a bright spot during the darkest hours of 2020, keeping hundreds of millions of people connected to work, school, entertainment, and most importantly, each other. Throughout last year, Comcast continued to deliver above-advertised speeds to customers across the country, including in areas most affected by COVID-19. The remarkable performance of the network during this time can be attributed to outstanding work by engineering and care teams, key innovations and billions of dollars in strategic investment for many years before the pandemic began:

Keeping People Connected

• Since 2011, Comcast has invested more than $2.8 billion in its technology and infrastructure in Washington state.
• From 2017 through 2020, Comcast invested more than $15 billion to expand, strengthen and evolve its network nationwide.
• From 2017 through 2020, the company built an additional 39,153 route miles of fiber into the network, and made thousands of capacity augments from the core of our network all the way down to individual neighborhoods throughout the U.S.