A lot of people are planning for a night on the town, but regardless of what they do, sending New Year’s messages rates just as highly, and that will mean a lot of activity on telco networks.
Vodafone has already announced it expects a boost in traffic out and about, and so has set up mobile communication boosters to help keep network connects solid, but today Telstra has come out and said just what it expects to see on its network, and according to the telco, the surge is “unprecedented”.
“The amount of data we predict to be downloaded on New Year’s Eve is the equivalent of one person continuously watching 90 years of High Definition content, which is a fair load for the network to carry,” said Channa Seneviratne, Director for Wireless Network Engineering at Telstra.
That might sound like a lot already, but let’s put that into numbers, with the prediction sitting at a staggering almost 1.150 terabytes (TB), which itself means 1.15 million gigabytes (GB) of data downloaded on New Year’s Eve, something Telstra says if 40 percent more than last year.
Calls will be made too, with up to 40 millions calls from mobiles, while texts skyrocket to almost 55 million messages, with 12 million of those occurring between 11pm and 2am.
While Telstra hasn’t said if its network should be able to put up with the demand, it has suggested one of the things we suggested in our recent guide to getting the message out on New Year’s, with Telstra customers recommended to log on to Telstra’s “Air” WiFi network which is free for Telstra customers across the nation.
That could alleviate some of the stress of Telstra’s 4G network, but we can’t imagine it’ll get it all, especially if the Air hotspots aren’t available near where you’re celebrating, because they’re in many places, but they’re not everywhere, and they’re not even as fast on the upload.
Here’s hoping the network stays up, and if it doesn’t, you know why: everyone else is using it, adding to that massive amount of NYE traffic.
