The 101TB man — Biggest bandwidth hogs in South Africa

Several demanding fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) users consumed over 50 terabytes (TB) of data in November 2022, feedback from three major Internet service providers (ISPs) has shown.

However, traffic on major fibre networks appears to have slowed down substantially compared to a year ago.

Afrihost, Cool Ideas and Vox provided MyBroadband with the consumption figures of their most demanding FTTH users for November 2022.

A Vox customer with a symmetric 1Gbps package on the Frogfoot network reached the highest data consumption overall — 101TB.

While that was a substantial amount of data compared to the average user, it was much less than the roughly 164TB used by the biggest bandwidth hog in November 2021.

The second-biggest consumer for November 2022 was a Cool Ideas customer with a 500/500Mbps line on MetroFibre, who consumed roughly 75TB.

Last year in the same month, the biggest data user on the same ISP’s network consumed over 130TB.

Rounding out the top three was Afrihost customer who consumed about 71TB during the month.

Afrihost said this customer did not usually feature in the top 3, and had tripled their typical usage from previous months.

By comparison, the #3 most-demanding FTTH data user in November 2021 consumed over 89TB.

The table below shows the top three biggest data consumers on FTTH packages from Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and Vox.

Afrihost was not able to provide accurate details on what types of data its most demanding users consumed, because its traffic reports also include the consumption of fixed-LTE, mobile, and DSL.

Cool Ideas said it noticed an increase in traffic through local peering instead of international transit. That is likely down to more companies starting to peer their content and services in South African facilities.

Cool Ideas also said its biggest traffic driver was Netflix by far.

Video streaming services have been the biggest source of data traffic on many FTTH networks in the past few years, surpassing peer-to-peer consumption.

Before the more general availability of international streaming services in the country, many Internet users relied on torrents, which use peer-to-peer communication, to download popular movies and TV shows.

Vox provided a detailed breakdown of the most popular video streaming services on its FTTH network based on customer traffic.

Its data showed that Netflix led the way, followed by YouTube, with Facebook Video in a distant third place.

TikTok traffic came in at 4th, followed closely by Instagram, and DStv Now in the 5th and 6th places, respectively.

Showmax, Amazon Video, Disney+, and other streaming services completed the top 10.

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