The latest statistics on Internet activity in Australia, released this morning by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that while dial-up is dying it's still not dead.
The ABS reported 12,691,000 Internet subscribers in Australia as of the end of 2014. The majority are mobile/fixed wireless (47.7 per cent), DSL (40.18 per cent) and the "cable, fibre, satellite and other" category (10.79 per cent).
However, the ABS also report 1.25 per cent of subscribers were using dial-up to connect to the Internet — equating to some 158,000 active dial-up users in Australia. Of course that is a hefty drop from even five years ago, when around 10 per cent of the country's Internet subscribers had dial-up connections.
Exabyte downloads
The latest ABS statistics release also showed that the amount of data used by Australians has continued to climb. In the three months ending 31 December, Australians downloaded a total of just over an exabyte of data (the majority — 1,112,379 terabytes — over fixed-line connections).
Mobile/wireless connections (including satellite) accounted for 34,339 terabytes of downloads
Download volumes jumped 15 per cent compared to the three months ending 31 June, the ABS reported, reaching 1,146,743 terabytes.
Compared to a year earlier, downloads grew by around a third in total.
The majority of Internet connections had advertised speeds of 8-24Mbps.