Australians downloaded nearly one million terabytes – or one exabyte – of data via broadband in the three months to June this year, according to a report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
“Overall, there was a 16 percent increase on broadband downloads in the three months to December last year,” said Lesley Martin from the ABS, “but if you look solely at mobile handsets, then downloads jumped by 40 percent.”
“Total download volume for the three months was 996,160 terabytes via broadband, and 38,734 terabytes via mobile handset,” Martin said.
“Exactly five years ago, for the three months ended June 2009, we were just about to hit 100,000 terabytes of downloads, so today’s result makes a tenfold increase in just five years.
“The increase reflects the dominance of broadband, Australia’s continuing appetite for the Internet – and particularly the swing towards higher download speeds.”
The survey also found that two-thirds of broadband subscribers had download speeds of 8Mbps or greater, and that mobile wireless is the most prevalent Internet technology in Australia, accounting for half of all connections.
There were 12,483,000 Internet subscribers in Australia at the end of June 2014. This was an increase of one percent from the end of June 2013.
As at June 30 2014, more than 98 percent of Internet connections were broadband. The number of dial-up Internet connections continued to decline.
Digital subscriber line (DSL) connections increased by six percent between June 2013 and June 2014, rising from 4.8 to 5.1 million connections.
In percentage terms, fibre was the fastest growing type of Internet access connection, increasing by 76 percent since the end of June 2013, to 203,000 connections at 30 June 2014.
There were 71 ISPs with more than 1000 subscribers, down from 76 in December 2013 and 77 in June 2013.
The volume of data downloaded in the three months ended June 30 – at 996,225 terabytes – was up 16 percent, compared with the three months ended December 31.
Data downloaded by fixed-line broadband (963,429 terabytes) accounted for 97 percent of all downloads.
Over the same period, there were 20.6 million mobile handset subscribers in Australia, an increase of one percent from 20.3 million at the end of December.
The volume of data downloaded via mobile handsets for the three months was 38,734 terabytes, a 40 percent increase from the three months ended December 31. This represented four percent of the total data downloaded.
