Belgian 'top downloader' snarfs 2.7TB of data in a month
ISPs sometimes complain about "data hogs," often in the service of ridiculously tight-fisted data caps on Internet service. But there are users who deserve the porcine label, and Belgian ISP Telenet recently offered a rare picture of them. Can you imagine downloading 2,680GB of data in a single month?
One Belgian can. Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user slurped up 2.7TB of data. He was followed by similarly impressive downloaders who transferred 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB. These numbers drop off quickly, though. Only a single user on the entire network topped 2TB in a month, while another seven topped 1TB.
Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders to a discussion forum—but the goal wasn't to demonize the users. Instead, it was to show other people just how much data could be transferred in a single month. The ISP hopes to encourage people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans (with 50GB and 80GB data caps, respectively) to its more expensive "fair use" plans.
