Break out the floss and hit ‘em with the dab: Fortnite absolutely dominated our network this year! We’ve taken a look at the numbers and found the top data spikes for 2019.

We break our network down into two categories: fixed and wireless, each with their own distinct data spikes throughout the year.

On our fixed network, Fortnite dominated! Four of the top 10 data spikes of the year coincided with big Fortnite updates, including the release of Chapter 2 and milestone patches.

Elsewhere in the top 10, streaming dominated the charts. The Australian premiere of The Mandalorian on newly minted streaming service Disney+; the Australia Day Weekend and the Cricket World Cup all made the top 10.

# Week Key Contributors[1]
1 14 October Fortnite 11 Chapter 2 Release
2 18 November Disney + Launch & Mandalorian Premiere (AU)
3 28 January Australia Day Weekend
4 08 April Easter Holidays
5 25 March Fortnite 8.1 Release
6 26 August Fortnite 10.2 Release
7 25 February Fortnite 8.0 Release
8 7 October Labour Day Weekend
9 10 June Cricket World Cup & Queens Birthday Holiday
10 30 September First weekend after sports season

Out and about on the mobile network, Halloween and big sporting events took over as people communicated with their friends and sent pictures and videos back-and-forth. The biggest data spike on mobile was the equivalent of approximately 1.3 million HD Movie Downloads or 850 million Instagram uploads.

# Week Key Contributors [1]
1 26 October   Halloween Weekend / Rugby World Cup / Cox Plate
2 23 November   Australia v Pakistan Cricket / Bushfire Crisis
3 29 November Black Friday Weekend 
4 21 September Prelim AFL – Collingwood vs GWS
5 28 September AFL Grand Final – Richmond vs GWS

While we predict that this year voice calls and Christmas messages (SMS, MMS & Telstra Messaging) will be similar in volume to last year (46 million and 44 million respectively). We expect that data volume will jump more than 50% year on year to around 3.5 Petabytes. That is equivalent to approximately 1.4 million downloads of Love Actually.

Coomera: the data capital of the nation

Take a short drive from Brisbane down toward Queensland’s Gold Coast and you’ll stumble upon the regional gem of Coomera. Flanked by picturesque golf courses and the quiet, lapping banks of the aptly named Coomera River, this town of just over 13,000 people boasts the biggest data usage in the nation for 2019!

Queensland’s state average for monthly data consumption is a little over 268GB per month, making it the second highest data consuming state in the nation behind the Northern Territory. Coomera eclipses the state average, consuming a whopping 445.8GB per month per household.

Must be big Fortnite players in Coomera, we guess?

Coomera narrowly edged out a variety of other suburbs for their whopping data usage, mainly in Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales:

State/Territory Suburb Usage per household (GB)
QLD COOMERA 445.8
VIC ROXBURGH PARK 443.48
QLD PIMPAMA 441.6
WA BANKSIA GROVE 433.62
QLD SPRINGFIELD 429.5
TAS GAGEBROOK 428.47
NSW EDMONDSON PARK 424.6
TAS HERDSMANS COVE 423.5
NSW CANLEY HEIGHTS 417.1
SA ANDREWS FARM 416.18

State-by-state, the Northern Territory came in first place as we mentioned with 290GB per month per household, followed by Queensland, Western Australia (251.4GB/month); Victoria (244.86GB/month); New South Wales (242.4GB/month); Tasmania (233GB/month); South Australia (228.11GB/month), and the Australian Capital Territory (222.2GB/month).

[1] Between 1 January 2019 and mid-December 2019. Events noted correlate with the traffic peaks but might not be the only or biggest cause of data spikes on these dates.