With more than 1.8 million Australians connected to broadband and more than 2 million more accessing the web from work ISP’s are reporting bigger data downloads.

Australians who are connected to the Net are downloading more and more data, the latest report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows.

 Stats’ Internet Activity Report for the quarter to March 31 estimates total data downloaded by Australia’s 5.98 million subscribers during the quarter was a record 14.12 billion megabytes. This was up 28 percent on the September 2004 quarter total of 11 billion megabytes – though well below the 72pc growth rate experienced during the September 2004 quarter. It’s also more than four times the 3 billion megs downloaded in the March 2003 quarter (see chart).

 It isn’t just a matter of more subscribers. The figures show individual users are downloading more – an average of 2435MB per subscriber in the latest quarter, compared with 2057MB in the September quarter. That’s an 18pc jump in the average amount each subscriber downloads.Household subscribers, representing 86pc of all subscribers, downloaded a total of 10.56 billion megabytes, or 75pc of all data downloaded. Business and government subscribers downloaded a total of 3.56 billion megabytes – a 39 percent increase on September.

The growth of broadband subscriber numbers is mainly responsible for the surge in downloading, it seems. “Non dial-up” users make up only 30 pc of the total subscriber numbers, but they were responsible for 87 percent of the total data downloads.