OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the third quarter of 2024. 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 per customers in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the third quarter of 2020. These are the average amount of data used combined for all residential and small business customers. Over the last four years the average monthly download and upload usage has increased roughly 53%.

The average U.S. broadband customer used 35 more downloaded gigabytes and 5 uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. This means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers, this equates to over 4.8 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than a year earlier.

This table raises an interesting question if the growth in broadband usage is slowing down. It would be rash to draw that conclusion by only comparing the third quarters of 2023 and 2024, but a slowdown would be obvious over the next several quarters.

The growth in what OpenVault calls power users is even more dramatic than overall bandwidth growth. Below is the percentage of broadband customers who use more than 1 terabyte of data per month and those using more than 2 terabytes. These numbers show the potential harm created when ISPs place data caps on monthly usage.OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

• The report shows that the average rural customer uses only slightly less average broadband than urban households.
• Median household broadband usage was 389.3 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less. The higher overall average is explained by the large number of power users.

The report includes a section that shows there is no longer a strong correlation between household incomes and data consumption as was seen in past years. Interestingly, in the third quarter, the group with the highest average download usage was households with incomes under $50,000.