You most likely didn’t know the name John Szaszari a few days, but a lot of us sure do now.
He’s the Sydney hero/villain who downloaded close to a terabyte of movies, music and games when Telstra offered a free day of data as a mea culpa for having some pretty gnarly outages.
- 14 seasons of ‘Mythbusters’.
- 24 seasons of ‘The Simpsons’.
- the entire Wikipedia database.
- a bunch of software.
- a bunch of Xbox games.
- a bunch of Spotify playlists.
- much, much more.
He was such a data renegade, that Telstra CEO Kate McKenzie even shouted him out during a speech at a CommsDay conference in Sydney.
He says he’s now being contacted and abused by the general public:
“I’m getting a stupid amount of messages on Facebook, including abuse saying, ‘You ruined it for everyone, you abused the service.I think maybe they’re jealous because they didn’t download that much.Someone was arguing with me about me doing this to impress people … they were just name calling me constantly. It’s not my fault that a single screenshot of my data usage has caused so much discussion.I’m a very introverted person and don’t deal with all this attention, it’s interesting to see how this has exploded.”
So, the main reason everyone’s pissed is that they think that John ‘slowed down’ their network on the free data day. But John is quite happy to opine on why that’s ridiculous, untrue, and unfair on him:
“Telstra owned the majority of the bandwidth available. There’s absolutely no way if I had 10 phones, doing the same thing it would make an impact on their network.
It’s not my responsibility, it’s Telstra’s to manage that bandwidth. It’s up to them, it’s not up to the user, as rude as it sounds but that’s not my concern.At the end of the day the bottom line is I wouldn’t download this if I had a decent connection at home and could stream Netflix properly.I have to load the movie, pause for half an hour then buffer, I don’t know if I’d call that streaming.”
YES JOHN, SPEAK YOUR TRUTH.
He’s like, the Batman of free data. He’s the hero we’d all like to be and we need, but we don’t deserve him, and we try to cut him down. We shouldn’t.
You do you John. Enjoy all your eps of Mythbusters, homie.
