SYDNEY: The Australian Bureau of Statistics has shown that 15 percent surge observed in data download volume among the country’s internet subscribers for the three months ending December 2014, compared to the three months ending June last year.
The ABS, which released findings from its December 2014 Internet Activity Survey on April 1, revealed that in the three months ending December last year, customers of Australian internet service providers (ISPs) with more than 1,000 subscribers downloaded a total of 1,146,743 terabytes (TB) of data or 1.15 exabytes.
For all of 2014, Australian internet subscribers downloaded well over 2 exabytes of data; with a total data download volume of 996,225TB in the three months ending June last year, according to the ABS’ Internet Activity Report for June 2014.
The latest survey found that data downloaded over fixed-line broadband — 1,112,379TB accounted for 97 percent of all internet downloads for the three-month period to the end of December. Meanwhile, over the last year, the volume of data downloaded by fixed-line broadband users showed a 35 percent increase.
As of the end of December, Australia claimed 12.69 million internet subscribers, according to the ABS, equating to a 2 percent increase over the same period the previous year.
The percentage of broadband internet connections in the overall internet mix in Australia continued to climb, with broadband accounting for 99 percent as of the end of December up from 98 percent at the end of June last year. Dial-up internet retained a 1.3 percent slice of the country’s mix, but continued to fall.
Meanwhile, digital subscriber line (DSL) connections increased by 4 percent between December 2013 and December 2014, from 4.9 million to 5.1 million connections.
