July 31, 2020 Estimates for Internet Traffic in Japan

To grasp the actual state of fixed-broadband Internet traffic (communications traffic) in Japan, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) aggregated the amount of traffic as of May 2020 and has summarized the results. This aggregation is under provisional calculation with the cooperation of nine Internet Service Providers (ISPs)^*1, five Internet Exchange (IX) organizations^*2, and several researchers^*3.

Main points

• The total download traffic of Japan’s fixed-broadband Internet service^*4 subscribers as of May 2020 was estimated to be approximately 19.0 Tbps (approximately 151 GB per contract per month^*5), an increase of 57.4% year-on-year.
• It is considered that internet traffic increased significantly due to the time spent at home to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection.

• *1
  Nine ISPs: Internet Initiative Japan Inc., NTT Communications Corporation, NTT Plala Inc, OPTAGE Inc., KDDI Corporation, Jupiter Telecommunications Co., Ltd., SoftBank Corp., NIFTY　Corporation, and BIGLOBE Inc.
• *2
  Five IX organizations: Internet Multifeed Co., Equinix, Inc., Japan Internet Exchange Co., Ltd., BBIX, Inc., and WIDE Project.
• *3
  Esaki Hiroshi (Professor, University of Tokyo), Kato Akira (Professor, Keio University), Cho Kenjiro (Research Director , Internet Initiative Japan Inc.), Sekiya Yuji (Professor, University of Tokyo), Fukuda Kensuke (Associate Professor, National Institute of Informatics)
• *4
  FTTH, DSL, CATV, and FWA (the subscribers of the service partially includes some corporations.)
• *5
  One month is calculated as 30.4375 days