Half a Terabyte in one day
On February 9 Telstra suffered a nation wide network outage which was shortly followed by another outage in the beginning of March, leaving 500,000 customers offline. On the 17 of March, leaving about half of their 16 million customers offline. They were not able to make any time of connection.
“We were really pleased with the way the network performed given this absolute tsunami of data,” Ms McKenzie said.
“They’ve been pretty open about everything. I don’t see a reason to not believe what they are saying … If they can solve the underlying problems than I think in a couple of months’ time, no one will remember it anymore” –
Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde
The incidents led to Telstra customers enjoying unlimited data. Customers downloaded 3000 terabytes of data within the free unlimited download period. Out of 3000 terabytes of data, John Szaszvari, a resident, downloaded about 994GB of data. The downloading contents contained 24 seasons of The Simpsons, 14 seasons of MythBusters, the entire Wikipedia database and a “lot of random other stuff” and other tv series.
“Believe it or not I actually intend to watch it all – it’s going to take a while but at least it’s ready on demand,” he told Fairfax.
“It’s always movie/TV night at my house at the moment… “I’m thinking two Simpsons episodes per evening for the next foreseeable while to remind me of when I was a child”
Chief operations officer Kate McKenzie said that this is the amount of data, regular residential customers use in 40 years.
