An exabyte is a million terabytes, or a billion gigabytes, FYI.
New data reveals Australians downloaded a record amount of data in the three months leading up to December 2015, amounting to 1.7 exabytes.
That’s a new record for our nation, so nice work everyone. (We’re presuming
this guy had a hand in getting us to that number.)
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics -as reported by the
SMH - we’re up 50 per cent from the same period in 2014.
Much of the credit for the spike is going to Netflix, which (officially) arrived on our shores in early 2015. About 2.7 million Australians are believed to be Netflix subscribers, with several hundred thousand others belonging to similar video streaming services, like Stan and Presto.
The SMH suggests the ongoing national rollout of the NBN has also played a part in our increased downloads, with 99 per cent of Aussie internet connections now broadband.
The debate continues, however, over the quality and speed of the multi-technology NBN now being rolled out. (Your at-home speed depends on your household’s specific connection.)
What’s
most impressive is that our number of internet subscribers has remained pretty much flat for the past four years, with only one million new subscribers since 2011 (compared to the five million subscriber jump between 2007 and 2011).
Meaning, we’re all thirsty for video streaming, and getting thirstier.
With Telstra having given us two free data days this year already, you can probably expect to hear that 2015's Q4 record was shattered too.
Photo: Netflix.
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