Broadband use surges in 2017 on a flood of data usage, doubling in a year as we consumer vastly more online services and adopt UFB to power our lives

The amount of data being downloaded by New Zealand’s broadband internet users has almost doubled in the past year, highlighting the importance for New Zealanders to compare broadband packages before purchasing..

Stats NZ’s annual Internet Service Providers Survey shows Kiwis chewed through 275,000 terabytes (or 275 million gigabytes) of data in June this year, an increase of +93% on the same month in 2016.

Incredibly, the survey also shows that total consumption of data over broadband connections has increased more than 1000% since June 2012, when consumption for the month was just 25,142 terabytes.

Consumption of data via mobile phone connections also doubled in the 12 months to June 2017.

More Kiwis are opting to use the internet for services that were previously the domain of other technologies, such as phone calls (whatsapp, viber) and of course television streaming (Netflix, Lightbox) and more gaming is now done over an internet connection.

The improvement technology and the options ISPs are offering is also driving the rapid increase in internet usage.

The first big game changer is ultra fibre broadband (UFB). Four times as many Kiwi households and businesses have a UFB connection in 2017 compared to 2015, almost 400,000 in all.

In June 2017 35% of connections had a download speed greater than 50Mbps, compared to just 4% in 2013.

While 61% of residential households now have no cap on their data plan to allow them to take full advantage of the improved speeds.

Compare that to 2013 when less than 5% had an unlimited data plan.

So are you getting enough from your broadband provider?

You can find if your street has UFB and compare ISP prices and fibre broadband plans here.

► You can check the features, price and terms of most broadband offers using this handy tool.