When it comes to the internet, people in Australia are often plagued with bad internet. When they debuted in the speed index almost a year ago now, Australia was placed 18 out of 29 countries. Then back in February mobile internet provider, Telstra offered a day of free internet to say sorry for an outage, resulting in terabytes of downloads and the internet within Australia being affected all over. Now to prove their network can handle it they offered another free data day, and this time, Telstra’s customers met the demand with terabytes of downloads.
When we say terabytes of downloads, we mean quite a few. 2686 terabytes were downloaded, equating to 3.4 million HD movies, and some people took advantage of the deal more than offers. Sydney resident John Szaszvari downloaded a staggering 994GB from his LG G4 Wi-Fi hotspot, reaching download speeds of up to 180Mbps. While downloading Szaszvari also made sure to upload and back up photos, files and videos to the cloud, a clever use of the free data day.
Chief Operations officer Kate McKenzie took notice of this and decided that it actually equates to 40 years worth of a typical users downloads. So what did he download? 24 seasons of the Simpsons, 14 seasons of MythBusters, a “lot of random other stuff” and finished it off with the COMPLETE Wikipedia database.
With Telstra having issues and offering free data days as their way of apologising for the lack of calls or online access but with the data days showing that their network can hold up to the demand (even with some slowing thanks to certain people managing to push the boundaries of downloads), I think their reputation is starting to recover.
