The 164TB man — South Africa’s biggest data hog

Based on feedback from some of South Africa’s prominent fibre-to-the-home Internet service providers (ISPs), data traffic among their top users has continued to increase.

The Covid-19 pandemic has spurred demand for fast and reliable Internet access to allow people to work, learn, and entertain themselves from home.

While most of the population has to rely on a wireless connection like mobile broadband, fixed fibre broadband has continued to expand across South Africa.

Fibre bests both fixed copper and wireless cellular connectivity due to its underlying transmission medium — fibre optic cables.

These consist of a core that carries signals at speeds around 31% slower than the speed of light in a vacuum, much faster than what copper is capable of.

It also offers much larger bandwidth and lower data losses.

On top of that, fibre is less susceptible to theft or vandalism, as it has no street value, making it all but useless to thieves.

We asked South Africa’s prominent home fibre ISPs how much data their top three biggest users consumed.

Of the ISPs who were willing to share their usage data with MyBroadband, Afrihost had the hungriest data hog during November 2021.

One of its users, who had a 1Gbps connection on the Vuma Aerial network, consumed a total of 164.41TB, which works out to around 5.4TB per day.

The total is almost 30TB more than the previous top user consumed in September 2021.

Interestingly, the second and third most active lines on Afrihost’s network were used by the same customer.

They consumed 89.01TB on an Octotel 1Gbps line and another 63.91TB on a Frogfoot line.

Another major fibre ISP that saw substantial traffic among its customers was Cool Ideas.

Cool Ideas’ top user consumed 130.45TB on a LinkAfrica 1Gbps connection during November.

The table below shows November’s biggest FTTH users on Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and Supersonic.

Now read: Photos of fibre cable destruction that caused major outage