The 693TB man — South Africa’s biggest data hogs of 2022 revealed
Prominent Internet service providers (ISPs) had several fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) customers who consumed well over 500 terabytes (TB) of data in the first 11 months of 2022.
MyBroadband asked the country’s biggest ISPs for the consumption figures of their most demanding customers between January 2022 and November 2022.
Afrihost, Cool Ideas and Vox indulged us with some impressive statistics. Vox reported the highest amount of data consumed by any single user.
One of its customers on a symmetric 1Gbps package with Frogfoot averaged 63TB of usage per month, working out to 693TB for the entire period.
To put this into perspective, an hour of streaming 4K on Netflix — consumes about 7GB of data.
That means the total data used is equivalent to streaming 99,000 hours of 4K content or watching 49,500 2-hour 4K movies.
However, the customer would have had to do much more than that since there were only roughly 7,920 useable hours in the 11 months from the start of January 2022.
500+ TB for three more users
Afrihost took second, third, and fourth place, with three customers on Openserve 500/250Mbps packages recording 581TB, 561TB, and 552TB of usage, respectively.
The fifth biggest data hog for the year was a Cool Ideas customer with a 1,000/200Mbps package on Octotel’s network.
Over the 12 months from 1 December 2021, that customer had consumed 492TB of data, an average of about 41TB per month.
To make its figures comparable to Afrihost and Vox, we used this average and multiplied it by 11.
The table below shows the data consumption of the top three biggest FTTH data hogs on Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and Vox between January 2022 and November 2022.
Biggest FTTH bandwidth hogs — January 2022 to November 2022 | |||||
Rank | ISP | Download/Upload Speed | Fibre network operator | Total consumption | Average monthly consumption |
1 | Vox | 1,000/1,000Mbps | Frogfoot | 693TB | 63TB |
2 | Afrihost | 500/250Mbps | Openserve | 581TB | 53TB |
3 | Afrihost | 500/250Mbps | Openserve | 561TB | 51TB |
4 | Afrihost | 500/250Mbps | Openserve | 552TB | 50TB |
5 | Cool Ideas | 1,000/200Mbps | Octotel | 451TB* | 41TB |
6 | Cool ideas | 1,000/200Mbps | Octotel | 442TB* | 40TB |
7 | Vox | 1,000/200Mbps | Vumatel | 319TB | 29TB |
8 | Vox | 1,000/200Mbps | Vumatel | 275TB | 25TB |
9 | Cool Ideas | 25/25Mbps | Openserve | 290TB* | 26TB |
*Calculated by using the average over 12 months and multiplying that by 11 to compensate for additional usage from December 2021. |
All of these networks’ top three biggest data users had either 500Mbps or 1Gbps download speeds, except for one.
Remarkably, one Cool Ideas customer managed an incredible average monthly consumption of 26TB on a symmetric 25Mbps package.
MyBroadband calculated that such usage would be impossible with the theoretical maximum speeds of this package.
Therefore, it is likely that the customer had either downgraded from a higher-end package during the period or enjoyed some sort of free speed upgrade.
Fibre traffic plunges
While the data usage of these nine customers was impressive when stacked up to the average FTTH subscriber, it pales in comparison to 2021’s statistics.
Last year, one Afrihost customer on a 1Gbps Vumatel package consumed about 1,200TB or 1.2 petabytes (PB) over the entire year.
While that included an additional month not counted in this comparison, the average of 101TB per month was almost 40% higher than this year’s biggest bandwidth hog’s monthly usage.
In fact, three other users also had higher monthly average usage in 2021 than this year’s biggest bandwidth hog.
It is unclear what is behind the significant downturn in consumption among the top users, particularly as fibre prices have continued to decline this year.
However, it is worth noting that 2020 and 2021 saw abnormal upticks in traffic as more people spent time working and getting entertained at home during Covid-19 lockdowns.
2022 saw life in South Africa essentially return to business as usual, with many companies fully re-opening their offices.
However, according to feedback from Cool Ideas and Vox, video entertainment streaming services continued to dominate network traffic — with Netflix accounting for the largest amount of data usage.
Vox also provided a detailed breakdown comparing the amount of data consumed by various protocols on its network.
It showed that Facebook dominated traffic — with 10.78% of bandwidth usage — followed closely by Netflix with 10.43%. TikTok also accounted for a significant chunk of traffic — 7.86%.
The chart below shows a breakdown of bandwidth usage by protocol on Vox’s FTTH network.