Australian Bureau of Statistics stops counting 24Mbps broadband services

Conspiracy-theorists, get out your tinfoil hats and wallow in the 1.71 Exabytes of data we download every 90 days

Australians downloaded 1,714,922 Terabytes in the 90 days to December 31st, 2015, according to new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

The bureau's new Internet Activity, Australia, December 2015, released today, points out that 98 per cent of those downloads used wired networks, which rather dampens the argument that Australia can do without a new terrestrial network.

The report also notes that downloads increased by 50.4 per cent compared to the same 90-day period in 2014. El Reg notes that video-streaming arrived in Australia in early 2015, making it an obvious source of the increased downloads. And also that those services seem to have done just fine, winning over a million customers, without much fibre in the ground and a national average download speed, according to Akamai, of just 8.155 Mbps.

But we digress. Here's the data the ABS offers on downloads and their sources.

		Dec 2010	Jun 2011	Dec 2011	Jun 2012	Dec 2012	Jun 2013	Dec 2013	Jun 2014	Dec 2014	Jun 2015	Dec 2015
Volume of data downloaded
Dial-up	TB	183	106	96	106	103	66	73	65	25	49	43
Broadband
Fixed line	TB	174,665	254,947	322,280	389,130	526,472	629,964	823,421	963,429	1,112,379	1,349,975	1,673,123
Wireless	TB	16,990	19,149	23,142	25,301	28,196	27,232	37,426	32,731	34,339	38,673	41,757
Total Broadband	TB	191,655	274,096	345,422	414,431	554,668	657,196	860,847	996,160	1,146,718	1,388,648	1,714,880
Total	TB	191,839	274,202	345,518	414,537	554,771	657,262	860,920	996,225	1,146,743	1,388,697	1,714,922
Proportion of data downloaded
Dial-up	%	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
Broadband
Fixed line	%	91	93	93	94	95	96	96	97	97	97	98
Wireless	%	9	7	7	6	5	4	4	3	3	3	2
Total Broadband	%	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100
Total	%	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	100

Another item of interest in the new data is a re-classification of the way the ABS records download speeds advertised by internet service providers. The Bureau has combined the categories “8Mbps to less than 24Mbps” and “24Mbps or greater” into a single category titled “8Mbps or greater.”

That, to The Register's eye, is slightly odd, not least because DSL connections fell from 5.106 million to 5.03 million between June 2015 and December 2015. Fibre-to-the-premises connections ticked up from 420,000 to 645,000 in the same period, bringing with it lots of new connections capable of doing rather better than 24Mbps.

Why remove the faster category?

It makes no sense to do so in the context of the politics swirling around Australia's national broadband network (NBN): the government, having moved away from a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) build in favour of a less scalable fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) build surely wants to be able to advertise that the project is delivering the promised 25Mbps connections.

Unless FTTN isn't delivering, in which case it makes sense to bury the true state of affairs … at which point we're well into conspiratorial territory best left to others after noting that the ABS is an independent statutory authority (that has secured AU$250m in funding for a major transformation. ®