OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the fourth 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 fourth quarter of 2020. These are the average amount of data used combined for all residential and small business customers.
The average U.S. broadband customer used 51 more downloaded gigabytes and 6 more uploaded gigabytes per month than a year earlier. The interesting trend to note is that average download usage has grown roughly 50 gigabits each year since 2020.
This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this means over 5.2 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than a year earlier.
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:
- Median household broadband usage was 461.2 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less. The gap between the median and average usage is explained by the large number of power users.
- The report includes an interesting graph showing the nationwide broadband usage on Christmas, which is the busiest broadband day each year. The comparison between 2020, 2022, and 2024 is dramatic.
I think these numbers are averaging out a few things. I’d love to see nationwide same-service changes in usage. Instead this is just something like ‘total Mb divided by total users’ sort of numbers.
We see a couple of drivers of increase.
1- people that upgrade from 30Mbps jump into a new default streaming bitrate, driving numbers up.
2- an ‘inflation’ like increase in the average size of any sort of content, web pages or game downloads etc.
3- increase in ‘IoT’ (including consumer cameras like ring) add background throughput, especially on the upload side. We’ve seen double digit percent of upload use on ‘alexa’ devices, identified by thousands of devices talking to just a couple of amazon/alexa IPs.
4- tiktok/reels/instagram use has exploded, so the number of people in a home actively using data increased.
This all tracks in the report, but I’d just love to see it broken out.
Breaking it out would give us a better idea of what people are choosing to use more data on vs that ‘inflation’ increase where same-services would see more use even if no human behavior changed.
That detail is available – for a gigantic fee. The big carriers buy all sorts of analytics from OpenVault and Ookla. They want to see how their competition is doing.