How Much Data Does Australia Download?
Yesterday the Australian Bureau of Statistics released its Internet Activity findings for June this year. And it looks like we Australians like our downloading.
For the three months of the reference period up to June this year, Australians downloaded 99 993 TB of data. Terabytes. Which, according to Google, is equivalent to 102 391 808 gigabytes. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?
What’s more, 75 percent of that came from household connections rather than business connections. Considering the report also says that there are 7,031,000 household internet connections (both dialup and broadband), that equates to just under 11GB per household. Over three months. Which is less than 4GB a month. Which suddenly isn’t that much at all, really.
Also interesting to note is that wireless internet access has jumped from 1.3 million users last December to two million users in June, or a 51% increase over a six month period. And that doesn’t even include mobile phones.
You can check out all the findings yourself over at the ABS wesite.
[ABS – Thanks Eamon!]
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Comments
Is there a figure on how much of that was done by the 84% of 16 – 18 year old males, who accidently found porn?
Hahaha
Accidentally? Hehe! Me thinks not ;)
Seriously though, what is the deal with Australian ISPs and the shoddy deals they give us. I’m on a 40GB plan for $70 a month on internode. In other countries they have unlimited -UNLIMITED- download plans. I fail to see how we can be so different to other countries. Speeds? Don’t even get me started on that…..
I’m sure that figure would be a lot higher if we had reasonable download caps. Give us decent price internet dammit!
Im 27 and i still accidentally find porn…
To be fair, i’m sure that the majority of internet telco’s around the world look with envy upon the ones here in Aus. It’s probably to hard for them to just slap download limits onto their plans, and i’m sure that a lot of people are taking advantage of all the bandwidth that they get.
I think you’ll find 99 993 terabytes is 99 993 000 gigabytes, according to IEEE.
@egon, that would be true if there was 1000 GB to a TB, there is 1024 GB going on binary 256, 512, 1024, 2048, etc, meaning that there is 102 391 808 GB in 99 993 TB
I think you are confusing the TiB with the TB. He did indicate that he was using the IEEE standard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte). Most ISPs and hard drive manufactures seem to use something closer to the IEEE definition rather than the traditional power of 2 meaning.
I think you’ll find it comes down to our laws that stop ISPs from saying their plans are ‘unlimited’, because that would in fact be a lie. ISPs have load, esp. in peak periods, so they have no choice but to throttle people under a ‘fair use’ policy, thus it’s misleading to say it’s ‘truly’ unlimited. But I doubt the ISP would want to give up an opportunity for product differentiation anyway.
Piers: Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean there’s no reason for it. It just means you can’t see it.
I wonder what the source of this data is? If the ABS got it straight from ISPs, did they take into account cached data? Or just traffic into the ISP?
When I moved to Melbourne from the UK 3 years ago I was horrified by the way we are hammered by our ISP’s. I went from paying 14.99 pounds a month for unlimited (no shaping) 24MPS to 10gb per month at 1.5MPS for $50 you can imagine the shock. things have got beter though but still seems very expensive tho