Aussie Broadband reveals bandwidth usage increases by 25%

New data from Aussie Broadband shows that evening peak broadband usage has increased by 25%, with millions of Australians now isolated at home because of COVID-19.

Managing Director Phillip Britt said the company’s network has the capacity to cope with the extra load.

“We’ve been analysing the data since we all went into lockdown, and we’ve seen some pretty interesting results,” Phil said.

“Normally our routine per user growth is around 2% in a month, so this is quite a significant increase. Basically, we’ve seen data demand increase from around 100Gbps during evening peak, compared to figures calculated at the start of March,” he said.

Whether you’re working from home, ordering take away or just streaming a lot of Netflix, there’s no denying that the internet is now critical to most households.

“During the first two weeks of March, there was a 10% increase in peak usage traffic. Interestingly, day-time usage remained consistent between these two weeks,” Phil said.

The company said it started to notice a change in internet consumption on Friday 20 March. Phil said he believed this is when working from home really started to kick in.

“After the first week of lockdown, there was also a spike of broadband usage on Friday 27 and Saturday 28 March, during evening hours,” Phil said.

“We do expect evening peaks to increase further, possibly up to 40% going on international data. Given we already have a customer base skewed towards heavy streaming, we believe we’re reasonably well set-up to deal with increased evening load, and we’ve implemented the extra CVC (Connectivity Virtual Circuit) provided by NBN in preparation,” Phil said.

Aussie Broadband also publishes daily CVC graphs live, so that customers can see at a glance whether its network is congested or not.

“At no point do we expect day-time usage to exceed night-time usage, and all the information we’re receiving from overseas is indicating similar. But, we’re only in the first few weeks of extensive working from home conditions, so we’ll continue to monitor,” he said.

“Over the next few weeks, we expect to see further day-time increases due to a possible rise in home schooling, but we believe the network is able to cope with this too,” Phil said.

“We’ve built our reputation on how we manage our network and being transparent with our customers. What remains clear is that it’s more important than ever to keep everyone connected. We’re all in this together and we’ll get through it together,” Phil said.

Last month, Aussie Broadband announced assistance for customers required to work from home, including:

• Providing unmetered data usage between 6am and 6pm for all customers on limited data NBN and ADSL plans

• Enabling any of its few remaining customers on 12/1 speed plans to change onto a 25/5 plan

• Temporarily stopping most service suspensions due to late payments

• Offering support for affected businesses including reduced services and contract pauses.