Heroes Are Real: Meet The Guy Who Downloaded 994GB During Telstra’s Free Data Day

In this cynical world, it’s hard to believe in anything, let alone anyone.

And yet, on Sunday, a Sydney man took advantage of Telstra’s Free Data Day to accomplish the Herculean task of downloading 994GB of data, giving hope to everyone who’d ever dared to dream.

According to the SMH, 27-year-old John Szasvari drained Telstra by nearly a terabyte, downloading 15 seasons of MythBusters, 24 seasons of The Simpsons (which, it should be noted, is still not the entirety of The Simpsons), a few Xbox updates, some Microsoft software, and, oh, all of Wikipedia.

(About 100GB was used to upload his photos and videos to the cloud, because the last thing you want to do after downloading 900GB of data is accidentally lose it.)

Back in February, Szasvari spent Telstra’s first Data Free Day downloading 425GB of TV shows (specifically, Stargate: Atlantis in high definition).

Turns out Szasvari is able to churn through a seemingly impossible amount of downloads thanks to his home being near a 4GX mobile tower, giving him download speeds faster than 4G. Over the weekend, he was receiving average download speeds of around 180Mbps.

Users across the country cracked the download record set on February’s Free Data Day by almost 50 per cent, with 2686 terabytes. However, a number reported slow speeds… including Szasvari’s own girlfriend (who only managed between 5Mbps and 7Mbps on Sunday).

Now, Szasvari moves onto the Sisyphean task of actually watching his bounty.

"Believe it or not I actually intend to watch it all – it's going to take a while but at least it's ready on demand," he told the SMH.

Godspeed, John. Oh, and you can probably skip about half of those Simpsons seasons.

Photo: 20th Century Fox.