With a huge increase in the number of Australians working from home since the beginning of March, it’s little surprise that our appetite for internet data has grown immensely. Just how much? NBN Co reports that it could be as high as 70% during some hours of the day, but that’s averaged out across all connections from all providers.
Aussie Broadband reports that it has seen a surge of around 25% across the board, and it’s seen that growth emerge at certain key points over the last month:
As you can see above, the blue line represents the first week of March 2020, and the orange line shows the usage trend for the fourth week of March – higher evening peaks, but also bolstered usage during the day as well.
The real change kicked in around 20 March, when many users had made the move to working from home. After that week, too, there was a huge spike in broadband usage on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 March.
Given what we’re seeing overseas, Aussie Broadband predicts that we could see evening data usage spike by as much as 40% – the company has a user base which is skewed towards heavy streaming, and has already made moves to ensure it has adequate capacity in place to support those users (and the rest, too!) during these periods of peak demand.
For now, day time usage isn’t approaching evening usage, and international modelling suggests it probably won’t, but Aussie – and the NBN provider community as a whole, no doubt – is watching this space carefully to ensure it can meet the required demand whenever it happens.
