Fast Internet is a very chill situation that more Australians would like to know in the Biblical sense.
That’s the gist of a recent report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics which states – besides the obvious – that Australians downloaded nearly one million terabytes – one ‘exabyte’ – of data of questionable legality in the three months to June. That’s a tenfold increase on otherwise pretty dry figures gleaned from the last five years’ worth of Internet data number crunching. Look at all these things you’re learning.
According to the Assistant Director of the ABS, these inflated figures reflect “Australia’s continuing appetite for the internet” while also appearing to contradict
a recent government report that said – despite your best entertainment interests – that Australians “don’t need more than 15 megabits per second”.
Reports the Australian Financial Review:“A government-funded cost-benefit analysis of the national broadband network led by Michael Vertigan predicted most people would only require 15 megabits per second in 2023.”
Or, you should be content with this life for the foreseeable future:
However more than two million Australians currently have access to the mercurial web at rates faster than 24 megabits per second, and are using those deep and meaningful connections to download ten times as much very important data as they were five years ago, and 50% more than they were downloading last year.
To quantify those numbers in somewhat anachronistic terms, that’s enough data to fill almost 1.5 billion CDs traditionally received in exchange for legal tender 9-12 months after the content of those CDs was birthed unto the Internet.
Furthermore, the report finds that 186,000 Australians are still subjecting themselves to the stultifying, dulcet tones of landline dial-up modems everyday; also related to those findings, though not stated explicitly, 186,000 Australians are apparently masochists.
