OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end 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 monthly broadband usage for customers in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average U.S. average broadband usage since 2018. These numbers include combined download and upload usage.

Average broadband usage stayed at an annual pace of growth of 9% annually. The average U.S. broadband customer used 54.3 more gigabytes per month than a year earlier. That alone is a pretty amazing statistic – 54 gigabytes is a lot of usage in a month. With roughly 120 million broadband subscribers, this equates to over 6.5 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than just a year ago.

Another fascinating chart is below that shows the percentage of homes subscribed to various tiers of broadband speeds. There has been a huge shift in customers subscribing to faster speed tiers. A substantial part of this change was initiated by ISPs that unilaterally bumped customers to faster speeds. But over and above that trend, a huge number of households have opted to buy the faster speed tiers, as witnessed by the 11-fold increase in gigabit subscribers in just five years.

Open Vault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

• The average upload usage per household grew to just over 40 gigabytes per month – up from 15 gigabytes at the end of 2019.
• 6% of homes now use over a terabyte of data per month.
• Median household broadband usage is 423.7 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less.
• OpenVault showed the differences between residents and businesses for the first time. The average residence used 652 GB at the end of 2023, while the average business customer used 345 GB.