February 5, 2021 Estimates for Internet Traffic in Japan

To grasp the actual state of fixed broadband Internet traffic in Japan, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) aggregated the amount of traffic as of November 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.

1. Main points

• The total download traffic of Japan’s fixed broadband Internet service^*4 subscribers as of November 2021 was estimated to be approximately 19.8 Tbps (approximately 154 GB per contract per month^*5, an increase of 56.7% year-on-year.
• The internet traffic as of November 2020, increased significantly compared to the same month last year. This is the same as of May 2020. Due to the COVID-19, many people stay at home, and frequently used internet for working online, watching Videos and entertainment contents. It might be the reason for the traffic increases. We can say this expansion of Internet use as “new daily life” in the era of COVID-19.

• *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 the WIDE Project.
• *3
  ESAKI Hiroshi, (Professor, University of Tokyo), KATO Akira, (Professor, Keio University), CHO Kenjiro, (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 those provided by corporations)
• *5
  One month is calculated as 30.4375 days

2. Others

The published material is in Japanese only.