Free Data Day Went Bad for Mobile Carrier

People use their mobile phones for a lot of things, from texting and playing games to browsing and downloading. The problem with using something like your mobile or even your computer is that when the networks go down, you lose everything. Not being able to watch your latest show can be troublesome and so Telstra, an Australian provider, offered a day of free data to say sorry for an outage only to find it had a bad impact on the more than just their network.

With no restrictions on what the data could be used for, the “Free Mobile Data Sunday” promotion showed everyone just how much restrictions make us hold back, with users going as far as using 1.8 thousand terabytes in less than 24 hours. If this wasn’t enough of a figure to startle you, it equates to someone downloading an episode of Games of Thrones 5.1 million times.

While this may not seem like much, it was reported that the traffic was so high it even slowed down network speeds in parts of Australia.

Do you use your mobile phone for browsing the internet? How much do you use and would removing restrictions change how often you use it? Some users even used as much as 421 gigabytes, over 52 times the normal monthly cap of 8GB.