OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the first quarter of 2025. OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

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 first quarter of 2021. These averages include broadband used by residential and small business customers.The average U.S. broadband customer used 50 more downloaded gigabytes and 7 more uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. The interesting trend to note is that average download usage has grown roughly 50 gigabits each year since 2021.

This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this growth means over 6.9 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than a year earlier.

The report this quarter concentrated on the growth of upload usage. As can be seen in the table above, the rate of growth of average upload usage grew at 8% in 2022, with the rate of growth increasing each year. OpenVault credits the 18% growth of upload usage between 2024 and 2025 to the increasing usage of video calls, cloud backup, IoT uplinks, and similar uses.

This growth in upload usage highlights the increasing value in having adequate upload speeds for both residences and businesses. To put the 7-gigabyte increase in average upload into context, it’s the equivalent of every household uploading 5 standard definition movie files or 2 high definition movie files every month. I think the average household would be surprised about how much data they are uploading.

Another interesting statistic from OpenVault is the change over time in broadband subscriptions. For years, the trend has been growth in the percentage of broadband customers subscribing to faster speeds. The following table documents a big increase in the percentage of people from 2024 and 2025 subscribing to speeds faster than 500 Mbps. The big shift in the last year is customers upgrading to speeds of at least 500 Mbps. OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

• 9% of broadband subscribers now use more than 2 terabytes of data per month. 0.16% of homes now use more than 5 terabytes per month.
• Business peak usage has been growing at a faster rate than residential usage. The peak usage measures the busiest hour of the day. Business peak upload usage grew 103%, and peak download by 105% since 2021. During that same time, residential peak upload grew 76%, and peak download by 59%.