Despite being one of the largest mobile connectivity challenges faced by Australian telcos this year, the sky-high data usage at Taylor Swift's Eras Tour barely registered in Telstra's big-picture analysis of data usage trends for 2024.
Back in February, a Telstra spokesperson told WhistleOut that Swifties used around 11TB of mobile data during each show in the Melbourne leg of the Eras Tour. At the time, that was almost twice as much data as any other concert at the MCG.
The average mobile data usage on the Telstra network has risen to 9,000TB per day, however. That's about 820 times more than Swifties racked up each night.
While the Eras Tour was undeniably massive, a Telstra spokesperson told WhistleOut that you're only looking at around 100,000 attendees per night (and anyone listening outside the venue) compared to a population of 26 million.
"Special events like the Eras concerts are very localised trends of a very small percentage of the population so the impact on national usage is practically undetectable," said the Telstra spokesperson.
"Compare this to things like the Olympics and the Netflix boxing match where you have a much larger at-home audience (in the order of millions) collectively viewing at the same time. Those events are the ones that really show in our network data."
Netflix's boxing match between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul was Telstra's "biggest streaming moment" of the year, with the network hitting four times the usual traffic than it would normally see at 3pm on a Saturday.
Conversely, Telstra expects New Year's Eve to be the lowest mobile data usage day of the year. Telstra network customers have consistently used 30% less data than average on New Year's Eve.
Data usage was also up for Telstra's internet customers. 54,000TB were used per day this year, up from 50,000TB in 2023. The highest data usage day of the year was December 1, following a Fortnite update that dropped on November 30. Telstra says the resultant data usage was approximately 10,000TB higher than a usual day.
While data usage was up for both internet and mobile, this doesn't necessarily mean it's because of increased device usage. Factors like more video content across social and news platforms, a great number of connected devices in households, higher uptake of high resolution 4K content, and increasing file sizes for both game and updates all contributed.
Optus also released some top-line figures about data usage on its mobile network. Between the start of the year and November 24, Optus postpaid customers used 1,000,000TB. That works out to be about 3,040TB per day.
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