The launch of the latest version of Call of Duty's online battle royale game, Warzone 2.0, caused the busiest day ever for gaming on Virgin Media O2’s network.
The operator said there was a huge spike on Wednesday morning ahead of the launch, as players began to preload the game. Virgin Media saw a spike of more than double the average at that time as people prepared to play the new game.
Data traffic was even a third higher than the most recent release of a full Call Of Duty console game – Modern Warfare II – which came out earlier this month. Warzone 2.0 is a free-to-play sequel to 2020's Call of Duty: Warzone, and a part of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, but players don't need to own Modern Warfare II to play Warzone 2.0.
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According to Virgin Media O2, 138 petabytes of data were downloaded overall on Wednesday November 16, which is the equivalent of streaming over 41 billion songs, making it the busiest day ever on the network for gaming traffic. It was also the second busiest day ever for all traffic on the company’s broadband network, only behind October 19 when five Premier League games were streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
Jeanie York, Virgin Media O2 chief technology officer said: “Gaming is continuing to drive record network spikes on our network proving just how popular online gaming is with our customers.
“Our gigabit network, backed up by our market-leading Wi-Fi guarantee, is the perfect ally to keep gamers ahead of the game.”
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