To make good for a series of recent outages, Australian service provider Telstra on Sunday gave customers unlimited free data, and one man made full use of the offer downloading a reported 994 gigabytes of online content.
According to reports, John Szaszvari of Sydney downloaded 14 seasons of “MythBusters,” 24 seasons of “The Simpsons,” Wikipedia’s full database, Microsoft software, Xbox updates, plus about 100 GB of personal file backups to the cloud.
Szaszvari apparently lives near a high-capacity tower, which allowed him to tether his laptop to his phone and hit an average download speed of around 180 megabits per second. All told, Telstra customers went through a staggering 2,686 terabytes of free data.
“We reached the peak network traffic level of the previous free data day by 8:00 a.m. and stayed above that level until midnight,” said Mike Wright, group managing director for networks at Telstra.
On a previous free data day, customers downloaded 1,841 terabytes.
In a speech on Sunday for the CommsDay Summit event, Telstra COO Kate McKenzie made note of Szaszvari’s data use.
“Some of our customers really do have a big appetite for data,” McKenzie said. “One customer in particular took to Reddit to say that he had used the first Free Data Day to download more than 400 GB. On Sunday he set about breaking his own record. Throughout the morning and afternoon he was downloading at speeds of more than 100 Mbps, and by then end of the day he had downloaded an incredible 994 GB.”
