The 732,000GB man — South Africa’s biggest data hogs

Several of South Africa’s most fervent fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) users consumed hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data during 2024.

The country’s Internet traffic continued to see strong growth in 2024, with mobile and fixed broadband data usage surging.

Internet exchange point NAPAfrica announced it hit 4.5 terabits-per-second (Tbps) peak traffic in November 2024, up from 4Tbps a year earlier.

In addition to cheaper mobile data prices, increased FTTH availability has likely played a major part in South Africa’s increased Internet traffic.

FTTH is not only fast but generally completely uncapped, with no fair usage policies (FUPs) like mobile broadband products or legacy DSL services.

The underlying fibre optic technology used to transmit data over FTTH has plenty of bandwidth and offers reliable and consistent performance at high speeds.

Internet service providers (ISPs) may still impose acceptable use policies (AUPs) that allow them to cut off services or constrain usage for certain behaviours — like reselling connections.

However, during 2024, several major ISPs told MyBroadband they stopped monitoring their users’ traffic because capacity was no longer a concern.

Not having to monitor this traffic also saves ISPs significant costs and resources.

Three major ISPs that still measure user traffic — Axxess, Cybersmart, and Herotel — recently provided feedback to MyBroadband about their biggest data users.

It is important to note that these ISPs kept the identities of these customers anonymous.

Axxess said its heaviest data user was an Openserve customer on a 500Mbps package who consumed 732,250GB or 732.25 terabytes (TB) from January to November 2024.

That works out to an average of 66.57TB per month. That is the equivalent of about 520 copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 or 4,755 hours of 4K Netflix streaming.

The second biggest Axxess consumer was not far off, with 721.6TB consumed in the same period.

Axxess said that video streaming applications like Netflix and YouTube kept dominating the top used services on its network, followed by social media services and online gaming short to follow.

Cybersmart’s biggest FTTH data consumer blazed through 235.04TB of data in the first 11 months of the year.

Interestingly, 94% of this traffic was through uploads.

Cybersmart told MyBroadband it had observed increased traffic to locally hosted caches of the big five — Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft — as well as NAPAfrica.

Cybersmart also said that Amazon Prime, DStv, Netflix, and YouTube were always in high demand, with the classic 21:00 peak in these services persisting throughout the year.

Herotel’s biggest non-business FTTH user consumed 91.3TB between January and November 2024.

Herotel said that streaming also dominated on its network, with Netflix accounting for approximately 30% of its FTTH traffic, followed by YouTube with 10%.

Meta’s platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — made up 5% of Herotel FTTH consumption.

One interesting trend the company had observed during the year was that traffic was about 15% higher in June and July than in other months.

“This aligns with seasonal behaviour, as people are more likely to stream movies and stay indoors during this time,” Herotel said.

The table below summarises the usage data of the top three biggest FTTH data consumers on Axxess, Cybersmart, and Herotel.

Herotel’s business users

It should be noted that although Herotel’s figures were lower than the other ISPs, it was the only one that distinguished between business and non-business users.

Herotel is heavily focused on coverage in smaller towns, and it shared the data usage of some of the business customers using its fibre products.

It showed that one Hero Fibre 1Gbps business customer consumed 1,619.2TB — or 1.6 petabytes — of data.