John Linton
I've been heavily involved in the set up and operation of several ISPs before setting up and operating Exetel and one thing that was/is, very strangely, common for each of those ISPs, across a timespan of 12 years, was/is that Victorian users average twice the bandwidth usage of all other State and Teritory users.
It hasn't made any difference in terms of 1995 (obviously basic dial up) to 2007 or in terms of total number of users or in terms of the 'service offering' of different ISPs at similar times; the same result happened with 5 different ISPs across 12 years - Victorian users use double the average amount of bandwidth as users in all other States/Territories. Users in all other States/Territories vary by less than 6% with NSW being the lowest on average of all other Australian areas. This result was also independent of the 'home State' of the ISP - with the five I have detailed knowledge about one was based in WA, one was based in QLD and one was based in VIC.
Apart from my own experience I've heard the same overall comment made by, what I would consider to be knowledgeable people, from two extremely large ISPs - so size doesn't seem to be a factor in terms of number of users nor of the actual 'target' end user demograhics.
As Exetel has only recently activated a Victorian PoP, this issue has only recently, again, become apparent as we have added users to the new facility. The rapid upgrades of connectivity bandwidth have continued disproportionately in Victoria to the rate at which we add bandwidth per 1,000 users in NSW and in the recently activated Queensland PoP - mirroring the 2:1 ratio that has existed for 12 years to my knowledge and remaining constant in moving from dial up to ADSL1 to ADSL2.
Interestingly the average is actually much closer to the 'average' user than in other States. In Victoria there are a lesser percentage of 'mega' downloaders to total customers with both Queensland and NSW having a higher percentage of that type of user. There are also a lesser percentage of very light downloaders in Victoria than every other State/Territory. So it appears to be that an ADSL user in Victoria in 2007 still downloads twice as much as the same types of users in all other locations. The ratio is consistent over all months of the year so the 'terrible Victorian winter weather' can't explain the issue and I have never heard any theory about why this is the case.
We will be adding a Melbourne PIPE connection in the next few weeks and I'll be interested to see if Victorian users share the same files to a greater extent once that facility's in place - though I'm not sure what that would actually explain. The Brisbane PoP will have the direct connection to PIPE installed by early next week so we'll have a 'benchmark' to assess the Victorian results against.
One of the Australian internet's ongoing anomalies.
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Tracked: Oct 23, 14:13