OpenVault just published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the third quarter of 2023. As usual, OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.
I think one of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average household usage of broadband in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average U.S. household broadband usage since 2019. These numbers include combined download and upload usage.
| Monthly | |
| Gigabytes | |
| 3rd Quarter 2019 | 275.1 |
| 3rd Quarter 2020 | 383.8 |
| 3rd Quarter 2021 | 433.5 |
| 3rd Quarter 2022 | 495.5 |
| 3rd Quarter 2023 | 550.2 |
We are getting so used to seeing these kinds of statistics that we forget to put increased usage into context. In the third quarter of this year, the average U.S. household used 54.7 more gigabytes of data than one year earlier. That alone is a pretty amazing statistic – 54 gigabytes is a lot of usage in a month. With roughly 120 million residential broadband subscribers, this equates to over 6.5 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than just a year ago. That’s 11% more usage hitting the Internet backbones, just from residential usage.
The following graph shows the average usage of household broadband by quarter, since the beginning of 2019. The overall growth curve has held steady since early 2019.
Open Vault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:
- The average upload usage per household is 35.9 gigabytes per month. Most homes don’t realize how much data they upload into the cloud every month.
- Median household broadband usage is 364 gigabytes, up 12.3% from 2022. Half of homes use more than the median, and half use less broadband.
- OpenVault says the U.S. average download speed is 498 Mbps, and the average upload is 28 Mbps. This is additional proof that the FCC’s proposed 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is already behind the market.
If they say the average download speed is almost 500 Mbps I take a different conclusion: their numbers look wack. (The report shows 62% of users *provisioned under* 500Mbps, so those power users on the gig lines are pulling everyone’s average waaaay up.)
I’d like to understand a lot more about their methodology. They seem to sell to service providers, they claim to understand “millions” of end users (presumably as aggregates from their telco clients?). And, as of 2023 they claim 32% of end users have gig connections — does that seem in any way likely? They distinguish between fixed rate and usage based billing and claim connection speed numbers are way up in the UBB portion — would this be capped usage plan consumer numbers?
Separately, Comcast claims 1/3 of their users are in gig plans, which also seems very high, but my general belief is, with docsys3.1, that we may see lots of users provisioned for 1g and it’s going to be very hard to tell what speed they actually see. (There have always been claims that telcos thumb the scales for speed test data… I know that results always look a lot rosier if you use the telco’s test application, for example…)
The fcc report from the start of the year looks a lot more sanguine, although their data are older
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/measuring-fixed-broadband-twelfth-report#_ftn5)
Even with a nation of gamers I’m skeptical that what they imply lines up with what is…
I don’t believe for a second that the average is anywhere close to 498×28
If you just look at the product mix of the big vendors, their most popular plans are far below this, 200-300×10-20. I think they’ve done bad math somewhere there.
However, the GB average uses match up reasonably well with my own charts of usage.