Potential Broadband Service Issue

Dear Customer,
As I'm sure you are all aware, today, 6th May, is Election Day in the UK. This election is expected to be one of the closest in recent history and as such interest will be a lot higher than in recent years. Since the last election the technological world has obviously moved on, meaning that a great deal of people will be watching the events unfold live via the likes of BBC iPlayer and other streaming sites.

5G have been quietly preparing for this event by lighting additional capacity on our network to cope with the anticipated uplift in streaming traffic.

Our projections put the peak of traffic to be expected between 0800 and 1400 on Friday 7th May as people log on, pick up the news from the night and the latest counts as they come through.

As things stand we have the level of capacity available to accommodate an event equal to our highest streaming event last year, the Andy Murray semi-final match at Wimbledon, across the entire period with no intervention from a traffic management perspective. However, as this is a unique and truly national event, there is no accurate precedent upon which to base projected traffic levels.

Our suppliers and our 5G Technical Support team will be monitoring the situation throughout the day, and should any steps need to be taken to protect the integrity of the network.

It is important to note that we will be very stringent with our monitoring of impact on business-critical applications and traffic types such as VoIP and our 5G Premier customers.

While we are confident that our management system will allow us to be flexible to avoid any great customer impact, we do wish to make you aware that some of your users may find a slight degradation in performance. This could especially be true in marginal seats where interest will be heightened, creating a local 'bottleneck' on the BT Wholesale platforms. We will be advising our Support Team to be vigilant of speed faults raised in this period, paying close attention to the regions with potential high demand and we would advise that your support teams should be equally vigilant to assist in diagnosing such reports.

Thank you for your attention.

5G Technical Support