The biggest download spikes of the year: by the numbers

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).

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[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.