It is probably not much of a surprise that over the past two Covid-19-affected years, broadband use both nationally and in Southland has increased.
New figures from the Chorus network have the company saying reliance on high-speed broadband connectivity shows no sign of letting up as digital lifestyles increasingly become the norm.
Despite pandemic restrictions easing, Southland residents’ data consumption has continued to speed up, not slow down.
The average Southland home or small business used 372gigabytes of broadband data in October this year compared with 278GB in 2019, an increase of 34%.
The Gore district data use had the highest increase in the region, up by 46%.
Chorus network strategy manager Kurt Rodgers gave the national context as broadband use soared.
"In the first six weeks of the recent lockdown Chorus fixed networks carried more than an exabyte of data. That’s 1billion gigabytes; it’s more than all the data carried in 2015, the year Netflix launched in New Zealand."
He said the lockdown had forced a change in online behaviours and led people to adopt more digital tools and services in many aspects of life.
Nationally, the average New Zealand home used about 515GB of broadband data in October this year compared with 329GB at the same time in 2019, an increase of 57%.
The demand prompted Chorus to announce its largest-ever performance upgrade for customers on its 100MB per second fibre service, expected to triple the download speed to 300MB/s, while increasing the upload speed from 20MB/s to 100MB/s.
