Telstra customers double downloads on free data day

Telstra’s network saw twice as much traffic as it would normally during the telco's ‘free data’ day on Sunday.

The telco offered quota-free downloads to its customers for the day as an apology for a nationwide outage of mobile services last week.

Telstra customers’ downloads hit 1841TB by the end of the day, according to Mike Wright, the telco’s managing director for networks. It was the network's busiest day ever.

(The Australian Bureau of Statistics most recent Internet usage statistics, covering June 2015 and based on ISPs with 1000+ customers, revealed that monthly downloads for Australians across all wireless technologies totalled 38,673TB.)

“As soon as midnight ticked over we saw traffic jump up. It reached weekday peak traffic levels by 8am and climbed rapidly from there,” Wright wrote in an entry for the telco’s Exchange blog.

“Over the course of the day we had twice as much traffic as we would normally see on a Sunday (or any day),” Wright wrote.

“As we anticipated, the high demand meant some customers had slower than normal data speeds on 4G services, but overall the network performed as designed.”