One of the great things about having a fast Internet connection is that you can download more stuff. Whether it’s faster Playstation updates, streaming your favourite movies and TV shows, or .. um .. downloading some Linux ISOs .. a fast NBN connection can meet your needs.
It’s not uncommon to see plans with 500GB (or Unlimited) included data, which is a huge change from a couple of years ago where plans with 20-50GB weren’t uncommon.
However, some people are taking it to extremes. This week, IT News reported (via Alex Walker at Kotaku) that one NBN customer managed to download 26,807GB of data in June this year. That’s 26.8 terabytes of data, which is absolutely phenomenal.
I’m not sure about you, but in my place, we struggle to get through 300-400GB a month, and a lot of that is streaming videos watched by the family and YouTube by the kids. We don’t download that many Linux ISOs or gaming updates these days.
To understand just how much data 26 TB actually is, you could download the entire collection of Spotify music within that allowance, or hundreds of games off a service like Steam.
This particular user managed to achieve this feat on a residential NBN connection, and doing the math, that means almost certainly a 100 / 40 Mbps connection, and assuming an average round-the-clock speed of about 90 Mbps, that connection was running 24/7 for a month to reach the 26 TB figure.
About the only way I can think of to be able to consistently download at such speed – given popular data sources get swamped in early evenings – is using Bittorrent, which means that this user has almost certainly drawn attention to themselves they probably neither want nor need.
How much NBN data do you use each month? I bet it’s not 26 TB!
