the earley edition » australia

Australian internet traffic doubles in two years, up 37 times over 8 years

Dave Earley — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 12:18:23 +0000

As part of the ABS Internet Survey released the other week, it’s interesting to see total data downloaded in Australia has more than doubled in two years.
Out of the two posts I was writing from that survey this post was to be the more substantive.
The first post was NBN to roll out 100mbps – so why are 16 per cent of Australians still on dialup?.

Instead, I’ve just come back to it and will post it as dot points.

Australian household internet consumption has grown 57 times since 2000, the first year the Internet Survey was conducted.

Total subcribers (including business) average download over three months:

2000: 273mb
2008: 10.17 GB

Household subscribers average download over three months (in 2000, there was only dialup)

2000: 174mb
2008: 9.9 GB

Other points of interest from the data.

Average internet data consumption per subscriber has increased 37 times since ABS first released results in September 2000
Average Australian household internet consumption has grown 57 times in the same period.
TOTAL internet data consumption across Australia has increased from just one terabyte of data in 2000, to 81 TB of data in 2009.
3.8 million connection in 2000 were almost all dialup, compared to 8 million connections in 2008, of which 1.3 million were dialup.
In just two years Australian data consumption doubled. In Sep06 Australia’s total data download was 36tb (to 81 TB in Dec 09)
Where the average (mostly dialup) connection in 2000 downloaded 273mb each, the total download across australia was 1.05 TB amongst 3.8 million connections.
In 2008, Australia’s 1.3m dialup users downloaded almost exactly the same amount of overall data as the first survey reported, this time 1.07 TB.

ABC Online – offline again

Dave Earley — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:19:10 +0000

Two weeks ago I posted that Australia’s ABC Online was down, showing an ‘outage’ message.

At the time I thought it was because of the Pope’s visit to Australia, but now it’s down again. It would be interesting to know why they’re down, or what’s causing the down time.

Again, the message on the screengrab is the same:

Weâ€™re sorryâ€¦

Weâ€™re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.

Did Pope Benedict crash Australia’s ABC Online website?

Dave Earley — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:41:01 +0000

The ABC website was down for a while yesterday morning. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen their site offline, and the message would seem to suggest it wasn’t scheduled.

I was trying to find something about a contact who was on Australian Story earlier this year, when I was faced with this ABC Online: Outage page. I tried navigating to a few other pages, but the entire abc.net.au domain was off the radar.

The following screengrab was taken Monday, July 14, 1.50am, and says:

We’re sorry…

We’re unable to supply the service you have requested. This may be due to unavoidable technical problems or very high load on our site. We apologise for any inconvenience and anticipate that normal service will resume shortly.

I did wonder if the blue was a nice homage to Microsoft’s universally recognised blue screen of death. The only reason I can think of for the site being down at that time is perhaps an influx of Catholics looking for news about the Pope’s arrival in Australia. Our 1-2am would usually be prime internet traffic time for both the west and east coast of the US (8-9am and 11am-12), as well as Europe (5-6pm).