Virgin Media Community

[John_G]

A connected Christmas, and an app-y new year

This year the average Virgin Media household had five different internet-enabled devices connected to their network on Christmas Day.

A staggering 25.7 million devices connected between 5pm and 10pm on Christmas evening.

That’s almost an 8% increase on last year’s 23.8 million gadgets.

The stats:

Christmas Day      25,756,453 devices      4,952,236 connections
Boxing Day            20,442,996 devices      4,617,544 connections

So what did we do with them?

 My own phone barely made it out of my pocket, and apart from a quick Christmas-themed Overwatch session on my PS4 I had a fairly data-free day.

So I've asked around - how did we all spend so much time online?

Jen_A
Someone in my house (who shall remain nameless) was looking up words on his phone during a festive game of Scrabble...
and I may have had a quick go on Pokemon Go too.

Terri_P
Sky Cinema Pixar movies on demand through my TiVo in the day, Deadpool at night and lots of Whatsapp and Facebook messages, and video chats with my family in Texas. We also played around with some great VR videos on YouTube as well.

Liam_T
Facetime on the iPad with family in England who we weren't seeing until Boxing Day, and The Expanse on Netflix in the evening

James_W
Google Hangouts with family in North Wales and southern England, downloading updates for my son's new console game, and every footstep of our Christmas walk tracked by my Fitbit.
And a Netflix Slow TV Fireplace channel in the background while we opened our presents.

Whatever you got up to, it’s clear our Christmases are getting more technologically advanced. 

 

Seasons Greetings, out and about

While out for a walk to settle the massive Christmas dinner just under two million devices were connected to our Virgin Media mobile network making use of the new 4G service to send almost 12 terabytes of data.

Whether that's catching Pokemon or syncing up with wearable tech like Jen and James, or sending and receiving Facebook messages and uploading shots of the morning frost to Instagram - that's a lot of data - the equivalent of almost 50 million pictures being sent via Snapchat.

Happy New Year

We’re predicting a million Whatsapp messages will be sent at the stroke of Midnight on New Year’s Eve and thanks to the new data plans on 4G mobile all Whatsapp and Facebook messenger won’t eat into the data allowance for January.

So get out there on New Year’s Eve and bring in 2017 in style!

[PrinterElf]

5?!? That many phones alone!

Plus laptops, tablets, at least one PC, and maybe even a camera!