Data consumption on the NBN broadband access network has grown more than seven-fold in the 2012-2018 period, hitting an average of 213GB/month per end-user premises.

NBN Co CTO Ray Owen told the Broadband World Forum in Berlin that with 4.4 million premises activated, that the broadband access network is carrying around 30 petabytes of data every day - the equivalent of about 15 trillion pages of printed text.

“We are seeing real surges in demand on the NBN network at around 3PM to 4PM when children come home from school and again in the evening between 8PM-9PM when people are relaxing and starting to stream videos,” said Owen.

“Whilst our current network is coping well despite the rapidly increasing usage we are already working towards making sure the network will be able to meet the demands of the future as well,” he added. “We have already deployed DOCSIS 3.1 on our HFC network to help provide greater capacity and are working towards enabling G.Fast capability on our Fibre-to-the-Curb network as well.”

The top 14 per cent of end-users are consuming half of all data on the network and the top one per cent of end-user premises on the NBN each consume around one terabyte per month.

The heaviest single end-user premises on the nbn network is using around 20TB per month.

About 50 per cent of peak-time usage on the NBN network is real-time entertainment – primarily video streaming – with around 30 per cent of peak-time usage coming from web-browsing with the remainder coming from VPN usage and file-sharing.