Belgian ISP’s 25 largest downloaders

Telenet, a Belgian ISP, has released a table detailing the amount of data downloaded by its most active users. The largest volume downloaded in the month of July is almost 2,7 Terabytes, which equals more than 570 DVDs worth of data. The 25th largest volume still was just under 700 GB per month. A lot less than the top downloader, but still a considerable amount for a month of downloading.

Telenet has recently dropped her data caps and instead adopted a fair use policy, stating that anybody with a certain type of subscription can download as much as they like, although when one exceeds a certain amount of data during the peak hours, the bandwidth is throttled from 30, 50 or 100 Mbps to 512 kbps.

Interestingly, on the forum where the table was posted, the first commenter was surprised that the largest users did not download more than they did.

Looking at the table, we assume that the decline of the curve is ‘hockey stick’-shaped. That is to say, at first it declines very rapidly and then becomes flatter and flatter. Judging the decline in volume from the first user through the 25th, we estimate that the steep bit lies in between them and that the decline from 25 onwards will be quite flat. Therefore, there will be a considerable number of clients that download between the 100-500 GB. Unfortunately, Telenet has not responded to our query for more information.

So far, downloading these volumes is only possible over fixed networks. However, getting used to considerable traffic over landline networks could also raise expectations about being able to download large amounts of data through mobile networks. Already, mobile operators find it difficult to cope with the mobile internet demand. Hopefully, they are able to raise capacity as fast as demand.

On the other hand, we do not expect that more data over mobile reduces the amount of data through landlines as applications that allow streaming data to mobile devices are increasing in popularity.