Major telecommunications companies Telstra, Vodafone Hutchison Australia and Singtel Optus are expecting record-breaking mobile network usage over New Year's Eve and Day, with tens of millions of Australians expected to text, call and use social media to welcome 2019.
The country's biggest mobile provider Telstra expects 2300 terabytes (TB) of data will be used on December 31 and January 1, which is the equivalent of an individual watching high definition video content constantly for 300 years. This is an almost four-fold increase since 2014.
Firework-watchers at Sydney Harbour are expected to use 16.2 terabytes of data this year, making it a usage hotspot as attendees take their celebrations online, uploading video footage and photos to share with friends and family. Terabytes more will be used during celebrations in the Melbourne CBD.
If Telstra's predictions turn out correct, the increase will represent a a 53 per cent uptick in data usage compared to the year before. In Melbourne, data usage will rise 40 per cent over the same period.
While data use will be at its highest ever, SMS messages will be flat year-on-year with 91 million texts expected to be sent, of which 4 million are forecast to be sent in the hour between midnight and 1am.
Text messaging has become less popular over the major networks since the rise of messaging apps like WhatsApp. Instead these apps are contributing to the rise in data usage, along with a surge in higher resolution videos being recorded, shared and downloaded on mobile devices.
About 39 million calls from mobiles will be made over the Telstra network in the two-day period, the network's internal forecasts show.
Optus is expecting a similar surge in data and has also noticed a pattern of decreasing mobile calls and texts over the past two years. On Christmas Day 2017, there was a 4 per cent decline in mobile calls compared to the year before with 65.6 million dials over the network, and a 6.5 per cent fall in SMS messages to 97.3 million.
Data usage increased 15.7 per cent on New Year's Eve last year. SnapChat users alone were behind 10.39TB of data consumption at midnight during last year's New Year's Eve celebrations. Data usage has risen 55 per cent in 2018 across the network.
Vodafone's 4G traffic increased 61 per cent in 2017 for New Year's Eve compared to the same day in 2016 (which was up 59 per cent year-on-year). A spokeswoman for Vodafone said the telco expects similar increases in data traffic in 2018.
Typically, New Year's Eve has a data usage rate 75 per cent higher than the day before on the Vodafone network.