BT touts 40 billion page views to London 2012 website

BT has revealed that it handled an incredible 40 billion page views to the official London 2012 website during the last two weeks, as worldwide demand for information on the Olympics rocketed.

The huge surge in hits on the site, which was hosted by BT, made it the world's most popular sports website, with 38.3 billion views, peaking at some 98,871 per second, which equated to 1.2 petabytes of data being transferred during the two week period.

The huge Wi-Fi network the firm installed for the Games also proved popular, with 13.2 million minutes of access served up to customers at Olympic venues, which equates to around 220,000 hours.

The firm's retail broadband network also saw a huge increase in traffic demand, up around 19 per cent during the two-week period, with 29 July the busiest day, culminating with Lizzie Armistead winning the Team GB's first medal of the Games in the women's cycling road race.

"The last two weeks have been absolutely spectacular, and we're very proud of the role BT has been playing right at the heart of the most connected Games ever," said BT's London 2012 Delivery Programme director, Howard Dickel.

"We've managed some huge spikes in traffic and seen video traffic over our UK retail broadband network increase by an average of 19 per cent over the Games period."

The firm is one of several to reveal the huge data demand the Olympics generated, with the BBC revealing a staggering three petabytes of data were accessed during the event, with demand far outstripping previous events, such as the 2010 World Cup.