The 411TB man — South Africa’s biggest data consumers

Nine fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) users on three of the country’s major fibre Internet service providers (ISPs) consumed over 1.6 petabytes of data in the first quarter of 2024.

FTTH connections offer the highest speeds and most consistent performance of any home broadband connection, allowing users to quickly consume vast amounts of data.

MyBroadband regularly asks fibre ISPs to share the statistics of their biggest consumers to get an idea of how data usage habits are evolving.

This time around, Axxess, Cybersmart, and Level-7 were willing to dish out some details on their biggest data “hogs” between January and March 2024.

The biggest data hog among the three ISPs was a Level-7 customer with a 500/250Mbps Openserve connection.

This user consumed 411.4TB during the first quarter of 2024, including 168.7TB in March 2024.

To put that into perspective, one hour of 4K video consumes around 20GB of data.

If all of this user’s consumption went to downloading 4K movies, they could have watched 10,285 two-hour titles.

It should be noted that high usage is not necessarily an indication of bulk downloading. Software developers who work with large databases from home can easily consume huge quantities of data.

Level-7’s second and third biggest consumers used 217.5TB and 193.4TB during the quarter, respectively.

Axxess provided the combined consumption of its three data-hungriest users.

For the quarter, the trio consumed 590TB — 206TB of which was used in March 2024.

Cybersmart’s FTTH users were more conservative but still posted over 55TB combined during the quarter.

The table below summarises the consumption statistics of the biggest data users on Axxess, Cybersmart, and Level-7 in the first quarter of 2024.

MyBroadband also asked the ISPs about the interesting trends in data consumption habits they had observed on their networks during the first quarter of the year.

Axxess said it has recorded a big uptick in gaming and network storage traffic from last year.

However, the biggest traffic drivers overall were streaming, general browsing, and social media usage.

Among the interesting traffic trends observed by Level-7 was a 5% increase over the weekend of 6–7 April 2024.

“We believe it’s a combination of the colder weather over the weekend and everyone returning home after Easter weekend — just a suspicion,” they said.

Level-7 said that media streaming and social media were its biggest traffic consumers, with the following apps and websites accounting for the most traffic:

1. Netflix
2. YouTube
3. Facebook
4. Tiktok
5. Instagram
6. Disney+