NBN traffic surges more than 80 per cent during coronavirus pandemic

The national broadband network has released figures showing the huge surge in traffic as more people work and stay at home.

The company in charge of the national broadband network has released fresh data showing the huge surge in demand now that an unprecedented amount of Australians are working from home.

The work from home revolution suddenly forced by the coronavirus pandemic has taken many by surprise and some have struggled to adapt.

Workers are adjusting to using new technologies to perform their jobs remotely, while the companies in charge of those technologies scramble to continue supporting them.

NBN Co is one of those companies who had to move quickly as more people were forced to work from home, giving extra capacity to telcos free of charge to support the surge in demand.

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NBN Co had to move quickly as huge numbers of people started working from home.

Some have questioned why the network might have been unable to support the surge in traffic, which is theoretically the same amount of traffic just from different places (if you don’t account for huge increases in data from videoconferencing), but — as is often the case with the NBN — the problem is a little more complicated than that.

Not only has data demand increased, it’s going across networks that haven’t been tailored to cater for them.

Most businesses, especially the ones big enough to make a noticeable difference on the NBN when they send thousands of their employees to work from home, connect to the NBN through business and enterprise plans, which are faster and designed to transfer more data at a time.

This also makes these plans cost considerably more.

The residential NBN plans like the one you’d have at your house (and now your office), are designed for residential traffic and capacities.

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The network is set to finish rolling out in June.

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The amount of traffic those connections can support differ depending on how much capacity your telco pays for, and download speeds top out at 100mbps.

The chances you’ll ever hit those speeds are lower, especially on the fibre-to-the-node version of the NBN that apparently has such a hard time delivering those speeds Telstra will no longer sell you its best and most expensive NBN plan if you’re in the majority group of Australians dependent on an FTTN connection.

Telcos have been given an extra 40 per cent capacity on their networks free of charge to try and compensate for the sudden demand on residential plans.

NBN Co on Thursday released new figures showing how being that surge is.

Good Friday let to massive spikes in demand.

During business hours in NSW data demand has surged more than 80 per cent since the social distancing measures were introduced.

People staying home over the Easter break also led to peak download throughput on the network more than doubling on Good Friday to 2330Gbps.

NSW was ahead of other states in terms of demand increases but not by a huge margin when you account for population.

NBN Co said the figures “demonstrate the change social distancing has made during business hours on NBN’s main wholesale service, as many people in NSW work, study and entertain themselves at home.

NBN Co chief customer officer Brad Whitcomb said the network was continuing to “perform well and that measures introduced to address the need for additional capacity were working”.

“Compared to the pre-COVID-19 baseline, we have seen a significant increase in internet use over the past six weeks as Australians have adopted broad social-distancing measures,” Mr Whitcomb said.