Aussie Broadband Just Booted the 35TB Bandit

Aussie Broadband Just Booted the 35TB Bandit

This week Aussie Broadband’s managing director Phil Britt revealed one user chugged 34TB in a month. Britt said the culprit would soon be hearing from the telco regarding its fair use policy. It’s made good on its promise too, because the bandit’s connection was just cancelled.

Actually, it was 35TB

The high data usage was first disclosed during a Reddit AMA with Britt. When asked about the highest download on the Aussie Broadband network he said, “Highest at the moment is 34TB and they’ll probably be hearing from us soon under the fair use policy.”

Aussie Broadband’s policy states customers can’t use its service in way that “would adversely affect Aussie Broadband’s network or reputation.” This includes “using your service in a way that interferes with or poses a risk to our network or other customers’ services.”

Reddit user theashwilliams, or thesammykins on Twitter, took credit for the data usage, claiming they actually used over 35TB. They linked to screenshots as evidence and sent a further screenshot showing the total usage to Gizmodo Australia.

The screenshot of the total usage.

“Sorry about that 34TB Phil, but pretty sure it was actually 35,399.47GB.. give or take a few megabytes here or there based on my stat for last month,” they said on Reddit.

Speaking to Gizmodo Australia on Friday, @thesammykins explained how they managed to use that much data and why.

“I decided to push the limit and ran a script that would pull a 5GB test file from Internode’s speed test mirror on loop for around 40 hours to reach what I’ve been told is the maximum on an “unlimited” plan at 35TB, so I managed to actually go just a tad over,” they said to Gizmodo Australia in a Twitter message.

“I find some fun in making spikes on the CVC graph with my gigabit connection so ultimately the goal was to make a large one that would stand out rather than a tiny one. Realistically just wanted to push the limits of Aussie Broadband.”

Aussie Broadband bites back

Since then thesammykins has been disconnected from Aussie Broadband. In an email seen by Gizmodo Australia, Aussie Broadband cancelled the connection late on Friday. The telco stated breach of its fair use policy as being the reason.

“This cancellation is taking place because of breach of our fair use policy in which unacceptable high use of service has occurred causing adverse disruptions on our network,” the email reads.

“Cancellation of your services with us will take place immediately on the 24/07/20.”

The termination email from Aussie Broadband.

Thesammykins has told Gizmodo Australia they already have a new ISP. However, they probably won’t be smashing data so hard.

“If I didn’t see myself getting booted off another ISP, absolutely [I would], however apparently being a high data user in this country is still incredibly frowned upon no matter your use case,” they said.


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