Some Maniac Downloaded 35TB in a Month on Aussie Broadband [Update: We Found ‘Em]

An Aussie Broadband user has managed to download a staggering 34TB of data in a month. This is the highest recorded usage on the NBN network. And since we first published, we found them.

The big reveal came during a Reddit AMA with Aussie Broadband managing director, Phil Britt. A user straight up asked about the most a user has download in a month. And Britt answered.

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“Highest at the moment is 34TB and they’ll probably be hearing from us soon under the fair use policy,” Britt said on Reddit.

The ISP’s fair use policy stipulates customer’s must not use their service in a 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.”

This is most likely what Britt was referring to in the AMA. Smashing out a cheeky 34TB would certainly have impacted the network.

The fair use agreement also states that customers can’t use the service in a way that breaches Aussie Broadband’s wholesale agreement with NBN, as per its own fair use policy.

That is an jealous-inducing amount of data and the culprit must have been downloading almost constantly. Still, 34TB is still a tall order in Australia. Despite being on a residential connection there has to be more at play here.

Aussie Broadband won’t comment on the incident or what type of content was downloaded.

“We’re so sorry, but we’re unable to comment on this particular event because we are currently managing it,” a Aussie Broadband spokesperson said in an email.

Last year NBN Co revealed that someone on the network downloaded 26.8TB in June 2019. It stated this was its highest on record. We understand NBN Co may have refreshed stats in the near future.

We may have found the 35TB Bandit

Since first publishing it seems we may have found the person responsible for this triumph of human will.

Twitter user Thesammykins is claiming to be the 34TB bandit.

They also posted in Phil Britt’s AMA on Reddit, cheekily apologising for the downloads.

“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.

The post included a link to imgur as proof of their exploits. The post is titled How to make an NBN provider scream in 2020.

@thesammykins also shared a screenshot with Gizmodo Australia that showed the 35TB used over two days:

“Honestly I average about 20TB/month give or take just hoarding websites and their data,” Thesammykins said in a Twitter DM to Gizmodo Australia.

“So 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.”

Their reasoning for the hectic data smashing really came down to seeing how far they could push things.

“I like to test the limits of things and see at what point I might get in trouble,” Thesammykins said to Gizmodo Australia.

“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.”

Update 7:58pm: Thesammykins has now been disconnected from Aussie Broadband. We have the full story here.