Aussie’s piled on the Telstra network for a record data day on Free Data Sunday

After a horror outage last week lasting several hours Telstra quickly announced a “Free Data” day on Sunday (14 Feb) for all Telstra Mobile Customers.  And boy oh boy did Aussies take that and run with it.

Group Managing Director of Networks Mike Write announced today that “By midnight, our customers had downloaded 1,841 terabytes of data.”

Wowsers.  No matter how you look at it, that’s a lot.  And while Telstra quickly pointed out that its “equivalent of around 2.3 million movies, or 5.1 million episodes of Game of Thrones, or 23 million downloads of Kanye’s newThe Life of Pablo album, or 1.4 billion downloads of last year’s Miles Franklin winner, Eye of the Sheep– depending on the source and the quality of the file, of course.” it’s probably more than just a day of apology for Telstra.

I’d think it was a great test of their network and infrastructure generally and how it copes with excess load like this.

If you divide that usage across ten million accounts it’s almost nothing. 184 MB per user.  More likely though that 70% of people didn’t do anything other than normal, but a bunch of geeks and data lovers chewed up the bulk of it.

Regardless, it was a good day for Telstra Customers.  Was it enough to make them forget the dramas of last week?  In most cases – probably!