July 21, 2021 Aggregation and Provisional Calculation of Internet Traffic in Japan

To grasp the actual state of fixed broadband Internet traffic (communications volume) in Japan, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) aggregated and estimated the amount of traffic as of May 2021 and summarized the results as shown in the attached PDF file. MIC made this provisional calculation under the cooperation of nine Internet Service Providers (ISPs)^{(Note 1)} , five Internet Exchange (IX) organizations^{(Note 2)} , and some researchers^{(Note 3)} .

Main points

The total download traffic of Japan’s fixed broadband Internet service^{(Note 4)} subscribers as of May 2021 was estimated to be approximately 23.9 Tbps (approximately 175 GB per contract per month^{(Note 5)}), i.e., an increase of 25.6% year-on-year.

Note 1: Nine ISPs: Internet Initiative Japan Inc., NTT Communications Corporation, NTT Plala Inc., OPTAGE Inc., KDDI Corporation, JCOM Co., Ltd., SoftBank Corp., Nifty Corporation, and BIGLOBE Inc.
Note 2: Five IX organizations: Internet Multifeed Co., Equinix, Inc., Japan Internet Exchange Co., Ltd., BBIX, Inc., and the WIDE Project.
Note 3: ESAKI Hiroshi, Professor, University of Tokyo, KATO Akira, Professor, Keio University, CHO Kenjiro, Director, Research Laboratory, SEKIYA Yuji, Professor, University of Tokyo, FUKUDA Kensuke, Associate Professor, National Institute of Informatics
Note 4: FTTH, DSL, CATV, and FWA (Including those provided by corporations)
Note 5: One month is calculated as 30.4375 days