The average New Zealand home is chewing through twice as much data per month as its Australian counterpart.
And it’s sport and gaming driving our biggest traffic spikes.
Chorus recently registered the busiest day ever on its UFB (ultrafast broadband) fibre network as the nation’s usage peaked at a collective 5.3 terabytes per second on November 2, driven by an update to the wildly popular Fortnite.
Mid-November saw another huge spike as Netflix livestreamed the Mike Tyson-Jake Paul bout, and there was a side-helping of cricket with the epic third (and, it transpired, final) day of the India-New Zealand test at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai, was streamed on Sky’s apps.
Kiwis go bananas for the multiplayer Hunger Games-style Fortnite.
Of the 17 biggest internet usage spikes this year, 14 were Fortnite updates.
The other three were sports: The aforementioned Paul-Tyson Netflix live effort (which saw some wobbles, more on which below) plus rugby games that were heavily streamed on Sky Go and Sky Sport Now.
They were the All Blacks vs Japan on October 26 (3.8tbps) and the Blues-Brumbies Super Rugby semi-final on June 14 (3.9tbps). Sky said more than 250,000 watched Super Rugby over its digital channels).
Some other points of reference: Traffic on Chorus network hit a then all-time high of 3.6tbps during the second Auckland lockdown in October 2021. The All Blacks-Springboks World Cup Final in October 2023 saw a 2.6tbps peak - or the equivalent of 520,000 individual video streams at 1080p high definition.
There’s been a series of big jumps in those subscribing to Sky’s standalone sports streaming app, despite a series of chunky price rises (greased by the disappearance of Spark Sport; Sky has cited rising costs):
More broadly, all of Sky’s satellite customers have the option of streaming via Sky Go if they’re at work or otherwise away from their Sky Box. (All up, including Neon subs, Sky now has 417,997 streaming customers in total).
Overall, customers are using 13 times more data today than a decade ago, Chorus network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers said.
“Seventeen per cent are what we call “power users” - they used over 1 terabyte [1000GB) in November,” Rodgers said.
The national average monthly data usage per fibre connection over 2024 is now 613 gigabytes (GB) of data
That compares to across the Tasman, as last reported by the National Broadband Network (Australia’s rough equivalent to our UFB) in December 2023, where Australians use 316GB on average monthly.
A key difference between the two public-private projects is that New Zealand offered fibre-to-the-door, while the Australian NBN went with the cheaper fibre-to-the-node for most connections (that is, where fibre is rolled to the neighbourhood level, then copper is used for the final stretch to homes).
The area that chugged the most data was the Waikato district (which includes the likes of Huntly and Taupiri and excludes Hamilton). Why Waikato, plus several Auckland wards? “We haven’t done a full statistical comparison but one theory is a correlation with household size and the average age and number of kids. Auckland and Waikato rank highly,” Rodges says.
“Another, related demographic issue is that Maori, Pacifika and Asian audiences are more likely to consume media online.”
Chorus expects 1TB average monthly usage on fibre by 2029.
The growth will be underpinned by the continued shift from broadcast TV to streaming, Rodgers says - and beyond the rise of Sky’s streaming options, there is the rise of TVNZ+ and more and more people consuming the likes of Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video in bandwidth-hungry 4K ultra high definition. (Sky and TVNZ and other local contenders are still on standard HD, which doesn’t look quite as good but only consumes a quarter of the data).
A 2024 study for NZ on Air found that 38% of New Zealanders access Netflix each day, down from 42% in 2023.
Disney+ was the second most popular service, increasing slightly to 13%, with Amazon Prime Video increasing 1% to 11%.
Then there’s higher-definition YouTube and the growing level of video on news sites.
Overall, Chorus expects 14% growth in data consumption over the next decade, and it’s urging the Government to chip in to a $2.5 billion plan it has on the whiteboard to expand UFB fibre into rural areas.
Telecommunications Minister Paul Goldsmith hasn’t ruled it out, but has pointed to “fiscal constraints” as he gets the lay of the land - which now includes a boom in DIY rural installs for Elon Musk’s Starlink.
Live sports streaming, 4K, and AI will boost NZ data consumption in the years to come, Rodgers says.
Wobbles with the Tyson-Paul fight, and Elon Musk’s earlier patchy pre-election interview with Donald Trump on X, which was delayed 40 minutes by technical issues, prove that even the world’s largest tech firms find streaming live events tricky.
A big show - like the second series of Squid Game, due later this month - can be cached locally. That is, copies of the show can be stashed on the Netflix server at Spark, One NZ, 2degrees and other internet providers around the world, among other techniques to smooth and speed prepackaged content.
These tricks help get around the fact that the internet was designed for person-to-person or “point-to-point communication, while broadcast channels are built from the ground up for one-to-many transmissions.
But when Netflix tried to serve 65 million concurrent streams of the Tyson-Paul fight, for many the stream was as sluggish as the former heavyweight champ, with some seeing a spinning Netflix logo as the footage buffered or a fuzzy picture.
Anybody else's @netflix service crashing constantly during #PaulTyson pic.twitter.com/jfw4KmMKVs
— Yared Vazquez, M.D. (Octagon Doctor) (@dryared) November 16, 2024
“This unprecedented scale created many technical challenges, which the launch team tackled brilliantly by prioritising stability of the stream for the majority of viewers,” Netflix’s chief technology officer Elizabeth Stone said in a message to employees reported by Bloomberg.
“We don’t want to dismiss the poor experience of some members, and we know we have room for improvement, but still consider this event a huge success.”
Some of the angry social media mob would beg to differ. It was a reminder that any internet connection is only as strong as its weakest link.
Chorus’s UFB network can be top-notch, but if the organiser of a live event has an overloaded set-up - or, at the other end of the chain - your home has creaky wi-fi - the end result can still be patchy.
Rodgers sees the coming Wi-Fi 7 as helping to release the “handbrake” that shows down shared internet connections at home (the current standard Wi-Fi 6, already goes a long way, if you’re looking to upgrade your home’s hardware).
Meanwhile, Spark, One NZ, and 2degrees see the coming 6G mobile network technology as the next big thing in wireless, which could make Wi-Fi redundant.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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