Petabyte people — South Africa’s biggest bandwidth beasts

Just ten of South Africa’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) users accounted for over two petabytes of Internet data consumption in the first half of 2024.

Internet traffic in South Africa has increased substantially over the past few years.

Internet exchange point NAPAfrica has consistently recorded peak daily traffic over four terabits-per-second (Tbps) since May 2024.

At that speed, roughly 500GB of data was downloaded and uploaded from locally-peering services in just one second.

The exchange point first breached 1Tbps traffic in March 2020, followed by 2Tbps in June 2021, and then 3Tbps in February 2023.

A major contributor to this traffic surge has been the expansion of FTTH, which offers the highest speeds and most stable connections of any generally available consumer broadband in South Africa.

According to research from the Internet Service Providers Association, over half of the country’s population has access to at least one FTTH network at their home.

Another factor has been increased video streaming and downloading of gaming content, applications which use substantially more data than regular Internet browsing.

MyBroadband regularly asks the country’s biggest fibre Internet service providers (ISPs) for the consumption figures of their data-heavy users.

We recently found that several ISPs have stopped tracking usage because network capacity has become less of an issue than in previous years.

One example is Vox, which told MyBroadband that it no longer measures individual user data usage due to its commitment to provide truly uncapped fibre broadband services.

The ISP said it had no valid concerns regarding abuse of its network resources or bandwidth usage reaching a point where service quality degrades for other users.

At least four users with more than 50TB per month

For our latest breakdown of the biggest fibre bandwidth users, Axxess and RSAWeb were the only ISPs that could provide individual user consumption.

It is important to emphasise that the user’s identity is kept completely anonymous during this enagement, with only their usage and package speeds shared.

In the first six months of 2024, the customer with the highest consumption was an Axxess user with a 1Gbps asymmetric line on Vumatel’s network.

They consumed 429 terabytes (TB), or 429,000 gigabytes (GB), of data during the first half of the year.

That is equivalent to the size of about 10,725 two-hour 4K movies or 1,826 downloads of the latest Call of Duty Modern Warfare III.

However, high usage is not a certain indication of bulk downloading or high-fidelity content consumption.

Software developers can also consume huge quantities of data while working with large databases from home.

Three more Axxess users also consumed over 300TB of data during the period. They were all using Openserve’s 500/250Mbps package.

Given their high data demand, it is possible that these customers would upgrade to a 1Gbps package if they had the option.

Openserve is the only major fibre network operator that does not sell such a product, with the 500Mbps download speed being its highest on offer for FTTH.

The only package it does offer with 1Gbps speeds is the substantially more expensive fibre-to-the-room service, which includes a complete overhaul of the home network with multiple access points connected with fibre optic cables.

The last Axxess user in the ISP’s top five FTTH consumers was on the Link Layer network and used 290TB on their 500Mbps symmetric line.

On RSAWeb, the top users were slightly less data-hungry but still consumed an impressive amount of data.

Two RSAWeb FTTH users consumed over 100TB in the first half of the year. These customers were using Octotel and Vumatel’s 1Gbps packages.

The third- and fourth-biggest consumers used 68TB and 57TB, respectively. The latter was on the slowest line speed of all 10 users for which we received data — a 400Mbps line on Octotel.

Finishing off RSAWeb’s top five was an Openserve customer with a 500Mbps package who consumed 37TB.

The table below shows how much data was consumed by Axxess and RSAWeb’s biggest FTTH users in the first half of 2024.