Australians want data. Lots of it.
The country consumed about 50 percent more data in the last three months of 2015 than in the same period in 2014, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' (ABS) twice-yearly Internet activity report, which was released Wednesday.
That's 1.71 million terabytes, up from 1.15 million terabytes in 2014. It's also a 23.5 percent increase on the three months preceding June 30, 2015, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop there.
In the year Netflix launched in Australia, along with homegrown streaming options like Presto and Stan, that increase is not too surprising. Not a month after Netflix launched in March 2015, Internet service providers like iiNet were already feeling the strain from the spectacular spike in demand.
While the vast majority of data downloads came via broadband last year, the amount of data consumed on mobile handsets also increased. In the last three months of 2015, Aussies made their way through 90,693 terabytes, compared with 52,745 terabytes at the end of 2014.
Those mobile numbers are sure to jump in 2016. They'll be helped along by Telstra's recent free data days, essentially "all you can eat" data buffets, which prove just how much the country can consume when given half the chance. Initiated after the company suffered through at least three outages in early 2016, Telstra customers made their way through 1,841 and 2,686 terabytes of data on Feb. 14 and Apr. 3, respectively.
According to the ABS, out of 21.3 million mobile handset subscribers in Australia, we were tucking into about 1.4 gigabytes of data per subscriber per month in 2015.
Finally, while most of Australia's 12.9 million Internet subscribers are getting online via broadband, shout out to the 93,000 people who still have a dial-up connection. Hang in there.
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