OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the fourth quarter of 2025. One of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage for households and small businesses in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the first quarter of 2022.As can be seen in the table, upload usage has been growing at a faster pace than download usage. In this report, OpenVault credits most of the growth in upload usage to computers syncing with the cloud. I expect that the average household would be surprised by the volume of data they are uploading each month and probably wonder what data their computer is uploading.

This quarterly report also highlights two other broadband topics. First, OpenVault compared usage for customers on fiber networks compared to those using cable company HFC networks. Had I been asked to guess at the results of this comparison, I would have guessed the usage would be similar for customers using the two technologies. I was surprised to see the results shown in the following table.OpenVault shows that the average fiber customer downloads 26% more data and uploads 88% more data in a month than a customer on a cable company network. I’ve been thinking about these differences for several days, and I can’t think of any obvious technology reason that would drive the difference between the two groups of customers.

Both groups of customers are mostly urban and suburban. I would guess this isn’t related to price; in most markets, the list price of fiber is lower, although cable companies typically will match or beat a fiber price when asked. My intuition says that this difference is likely due to demographics and not a difference due to the technology. My guess is that fiber attracts younger users and those with families, while older households are sticking with the cable company. For example, I know families with serious gamers who are only interested in fiber. Conversely, there are still over 58 million households with traditional linear cable from a cable company, and I expect they are collectively older than average. It’s an interesting topic for a researcher to tackle. OpenVault is good at analyzing raw usage data, but it has no way to add color to the data based on demographic factors like age and income.

My first reaction when reading this part of the report is that I now expect to see articles that cite this OpenVault report to claim that cable company technology is somehow restricting customer usage. The statistics in this report don’t support such a premise. In fact, the report shows that cable has faster average download speeds.

The OpenVault report also compared the way that homes and businesses use broadband. The analysis showed that households use 23 times more download than upload. For households, video represents 48% of all download data use. Businesses use broadband in a very different way, and businesses use 7.3 times more download than upload. Said a different way, businesses use a lot more upload, with 20% of all business usage used to connect to the cloud. OpenVault reaches a conclusion that I think most ISPs already understand, which is that residential and business customers should be treated differently for network planning.