The Petabyte squad — South Africa’s biggest data hogs in 2021

At least three fibre-to-the-home users in South Africa consumed more than 1 petabyte (1,000TB) of data during 2021, according to major fibre Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country.

Point Topic’s Broadband Tariff Benchmark Report for the second quarter of 2021 recently revealed the average download speed of global residential fibre connections increased compared to the same period in 2020.

Even in the Middle East and Africa, which is far behind most regions in terms of speed, the average downstream broadband speed increased from 62.92Mbps to 98.92Mbps.

At the same time, the average monthly charge for a broadband connection in the region has come down from around $165.21 to $149.80.

South Africa’s fibre network operators have played their part, with significant price reductions and line speed increases in the first half of 2021, including on the largest networks of Openserve, Frogfoot, Vumatel, and MetroFibre.

Many have also dropped 10Mbps as an entry-level speed and are now starting at 20Mbps, 25Mbps, or 30Mbps.

This has increased the average speeds observed on South African ISPs.

These improved speeds have helped alleviate pressure on households that have increasingly relied on reliable connectivity for working and learning from home.

Video conferencing apps like Zoom and Teams require relatively fast download speeds and sufficient upload bandwidth.

The increased line speeds have also supported greater adoption of video streaming services, which require high amounts of bandwidth compared to browsing.

Two of the country’s most well-known fibre ISPs, Afrihost and Cool Ideas, shared the usage statistics of their top three users during 2021.

Afrihost revealed that two of its customers had exceeded a petabyte of usage last year.

The hungriest data hog consumed a total of 1.22 petabytes on a 1Gbps Vumatel fibre connection. That works out to an average of about 101TB per month.

Another one of its customers on a 1Gbps Octotel fibre connection consumed 1.01 petabytes, averaging 84TB per month.

Cool Ideas also had a customer that exceeded a petabyte of usage during the year, hitting almost 1.14PB on their 1Gbps Link Africa line.

The table below shows the top fibre users’ data usage during 2021 on Afrihost, Cool Ideas, and Cybersmart’s networks.

Cybersmart’s Laurie Fialkov told MyBroadband the ISP saw an increase in overall average usage per customer — up from 127GB to 153GB per month.

The primary driver of this increase was video streaming, which grew quicker than any other type of service.

One of the other major fibre ISPs in the country, RSAWEB, concurred with this, stating that streaming continued to dominate its traffic and formed part of the most prominent application type on its network.

“It really is the rise of the video-first economy with growth observed around 45% in downstream (download) and 65% in upstream (upload) traffic,” RSAWEB said.

“The upstream trend is interesting as more people appear to be making use of “connected-video” applications like Zoom, MS Teams and Google hangouts.”

Level-7 said two interesting traffic trends it observed on its network was an 83% increase in TikTok traffic and a surge in Microsoft CDN traffic around the Windows 11 launch.

Notably, it observed its most significant drop in Internet traffic usage during the 2021 festive period since 2013, with 25Gbps less traffic at peak.

“We assume that many of our customers were on vacation away from home this December,” said Level-7 technical director Mario Pasetti.

RSAWEB and Level-7 also shared their biggest data users for the year, but provided their figures on a monthly basis rather than for the entire year.

RSAWEB’s top three users on a monthly basis over the entire year were as follows:

• December 2021: 131TB — 1Gbps Octotel
• March 2021: 95TB — 1Gbps Vumatel
• July 2021: 69TB — 1Gbps Octotel

Now read: Fibre for less than R500 — from 4Mbps to 50Mbps