As part of Telstra’s mobile outage last week, they were giving a day of unlimited data to every mobile customers on their 4G network over the Valentine’s Day yesterday.
A lot of Telstra customers waited enthusiastically and planned on how to, ahem, maximise this generous offer. Meaning, there would be lots of people downloading stuffs over the internet (hopefully legally, but we know better than that) and streaming HD video quality over Netflix, Stan, or Presto.
According to Mike Wright, Telstra’s Group Managing Director of Networks in Telstra Operations, over 1,841 terabytes of data had been downloaded yesterday.
That is equivalent to “2.3 million movies, or 5.1 million episodes of Game of Thrones, or 23 million downloads of Kanye’s newThe Life of Pablo album, or 1.4 billion downloads of last year’s Miles Franklin winner, Eye of the Sheep– depending on the source and the quality of the file, of course.”
The network was overly stable but I did notice a higher ping than usual when I tethered from my iPhone 6s to play Left 4 Dead 2 online. I got a ping of around 130ms, compared to the usual 30-ish on any given day.
In a way, I see this as a stress network test too in which Telstra succeeded considering how many mobile customers they had that took advantage of this free unlimited data offer.
I wasn’t part of the network “abuser” unfortunately, as I already have a fast connection with unlimited data at home.
Update: Speaking of which, a report from Delimiter shows a Redditor who took advantage of the free data day and downloaded a whopping 421GB in one day! Can’t really blame him though, he normally could only get over 1.5Mbps download speed on his ADSL connection, ouch.
