Tag Archives: OpenVault

Broadband Usage 3Q 2024

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.

 

Heavy Broadband Users

One of the most interesting statistics coming out of the latest OpenVault Broadband Insight Report for the second Quarter of 2024 is that the percentage of customers using a terabyte of data each month continues to grow. OpenVault predicts that more than 20% of households will be surpassing a terabyte of data soon.

The following table shows the growth in what OpenVault calls power users – those that use more than 1 terabyte of data per month. The 2 terabyte customers are also included in the first column numbers. There was a one time burst of new terabyte users during the pandemic like there was with overall broadband usage, but the growth has continued since then.One issue with so many terabyte users is there must be a lot of homes paying extra for broadband because of data caps. That is where an ISP charges more for usage over some predetermined amount. Most landline ISPs now offer unlimited data usage – but not all. Comcast has a 1.2 terabyte monthly data cap that it only enforces in some markets. Cox has a monthly data cap of 1.28 terabytes. Mediacom has data caps that range from 350 gigabytes to 1 terabyte for its various products. Sparklight has a 700 gigabyte data cap on some products but unlimited on more expensive ones.

I recall in the early days of broadband that the vast majority of ISPs worried about large broadband users. This was largely due to the technology in use at the time. For example, I know many early fiber ISPs had deployed BPON that delivered 622 Mbps download and 155 Mbps upload to a neighborhood node of around 322 homes. A few large data users in the same node could cause noticeable problems for their neighbors. Cable companies that deployed DOCSIS 3.0 technology had even more problems since they often had 200 or more customers sharing the same node. Since then, most cable companies have split their nodes and reduced the number of homes sharing the same data connection.

I remember working with a number of ISPs that wanted to know what to do about heavy broadband users. I recall clients who had customers in residential neighborhoods who operated music file-sharing servers, and in one case, a pornography server. ISPs worried about people who operated early successful retail servers. I recall a customer who generated a huge amount of traffic to support a chat line service – something the FCC eventually frowned on. More recently, one of my clients had an unusually large number of customers operating bitcoin servers since the ISP operates in an area with cheap hydropower electricity.

In almost every case, the ISPs decided to invite heavy users to upgrade to a business service, with the extra payments helping to fund setting up an extra node. In a few cases, the ISPs ended up disconnecting customers they deemed were harming the network. This was always a gray legal area, and every ISP who did this struggled with the decision.

This is less of an issue today with more robust networks. Fiber ISPs now usually have the option to serve a few customers in each node with active Ethernet to segregate them from other customers. I’ve always wondered how the big cable companies handle this – it’s not something I’ve ever heard them discuss.

OpenVault says there is now a growing number of customers who use more than 5 terabytes of data per month. They didn’t cite the percentage, but anybody using that much broadband is tying up a lot of node resources. And I’m sure there are some customers using far more than 5 terabytes. I still think it’s a valid question to consider if somebody who regularly using that that much data is really operating a business and should pay business rates.

Broadband Usage 2Q 2024

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the second quarter of 2024. 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 per customers in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the second quarter of 2020. These are the average amount of data used combined for all residential and small business customers. In the four years, average monthly download usage has increased 52% while average upload usage has increased by 80%.

The average U.S. broadband customer used 46.3 more downloaded gigabytes and 5.4 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 6.2 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 are the percentage of broadband customers who use more than 1 terabyte of data per month and those using more than 2 terabytes. OpenVault predicts that more than 20% of all customers will use more than a terabyte per month by the end of this year. 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 percentage of subscribers purchasing speeds lower than 400 Mbps is now down to 41% of all customers, a 33% decrease over the last year.
  • Median household broadband usage was 382.6 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less.
  • The report includes a section that shows there is no longer a strong correlation between faster speeds and higher data consumption as was seen in past years. OpenVault looked at 15 different ISPs in detail and found that the average monthly downstream consumption was similar for ISPs with average speeds between 100 Mbps and 700 Mbps.

Unending Broadband Growth

I wrote a recent sequence of blogs that look at the increasing demand for broadband usage. In today’s blog I’m going to look at some concrete examples of situations where broadband demand has expanded a lot faster than expected.

The first example is in schools. Ten years ago, there was a scramble to get gigabit broadband access to schools. Because of the use of the FCC’s E-rate money, a lot of schools across the country got connected to fiber and were able to buy faster broadband. The original goal was to get a gigabit connection to each school, and I remember a few years ago seeing a report that almost every school in many states met that goal. More recently, the FCC created an updated goal that schools ought to have access to at least 1 Mbps of simultaneous capacity for each student. Connected Nation published a report for 2023 saying that 74% of school districts in the country meet or exceed that new goal – an increase of 57.4% since 2020.

My consulting firm interviews a lot of schools every year, and we’re hearing that the 1 Mbps goal is no longer adequate. Just recently, we heard from a school that meets that target but still can’t have all students take mandatory state performance tests on the same day. The school still has to ration broadband to make sure that too many classrooms aren’t working online at the same time. I’ve talked to schools that have established goals between 3 and 5 Mbps per student to accommodate the way that teachers and students really use broadband.

Another example of fast-growing demand is ISP backhaul. These are the broadband connections that connect local networks to the Internet. I work with a lot of small ISPs. I can remember helping folks find backbone connections a decade ago, and a typical small ISP might have purchased a connection with an overall 10-gigabit capacity but only provisioned a few gigabits of capacity on the connection. Many were amazed at the 10-gigabit capacity when they first ordered it since it felt so oversized. They assumed that the connection capacity was going to be good for many years.

These ISPs turned out to be wrong, and broadband demand grew to swamp the 10-gigabit connections a lot sooner than expected. It’s not hard to understand why. OpenVault has been reporting on the overall average usage of nationwide customers. According to the OpenVault data, the average broadband consumption for homes and businesses has more than tripled just since the end of 2017. At the end of 2023, the average consumption was 641 gigabytes per customer – a number that ISPs would never have believed a decade ago. However, the size of backbone connections is not based on overall broadband consumption but on the busy hour consumption – the time of the day when an ISP’s network is the busiest. Many small ISPs tell me that busy-hour traffic has grown even faster than the average consumption reported by OpenVault.

The final example of broadband demand inflation is the broadband speeds being subscribed by homes and businesses. OpenVault also reports on the subscribed speeds that people are buying nationwide and reported the following statistics for the end of the years between 2019 and 2023.

This chart shows a rapid migration of households now buying faster broadband connections. Some of the increases came when cable companies unilaterally increased customer speeds. Since 2019, many cable companies increased 100 Mbps subscriptions to 200 or 300 Mbps. The chart also shows a big migration of customers buying gigabit broadband. There is nobody in the country who predicted in 2019 that in four short years, there would be an 11-fold increase in households subscribed to gigabit speeds. Most of these gigabit customers pay a premium price to get the faster speed.

There is proof of increasing broadband demand almost everywhere I look. I often talk to businesses that have upgraded to faster speeds only to find out that within a few years they need even more speed. I hear from farmers, photographers, newspapers, and others who send and receive gigantic data files that they are having a problem buying a broadband product that meets their needs.

Growing Broadband Demand

I wrote a recent sequence of blogs that look at the increasing demand for broadband usage. In today’s blog I’m going to look at some concrete examples of situations where broadband demand has expanded a lot faster than expected.

The first example is in schools. Ten years ago, there was a scramble to get gigabit broadband access to schools. Because of the use of the FCC’s E-rate money, a lot of schools across the country got connected to fiber and were able to buy faster broadband. The original goal was to get a gigabit connection to each school, and I remember a few years ago seeing a report that almost every school in many states met that goal. More recently, the FCC created an updated goal that schools ought to have access to at least 1 Mbps of simultaneous capacity for each student. Connected Nation published a report for 2023 saying that 74% of school districts in the country meet or exceed that goal – an increase of 57.4% since 2020.

My consulting firm interviews a lot of schools every year, and we’re hearing that the 1 Mbps goal is no longer adequate. Just recently, we heard from a school that meets that target but still can’t have all students take mandatory state performance tests on the same day. The school still has to ration broadband to make sure that too many classrooms aren’t working online at the same time. I’ve talked to schools that have established a goal of 3 – 5 Mbps per student to accommodate the way that teachers and students really use broadband.

Another example of fast growing demand is ISP backhaul. These are the broadband connections that connect local networks to the Internet. I work with a lot of small ISPs. I can remember helping folks find backbone connections a decade ago, and a typical small ISP might have purchased a connection with an overall 10-gigabit capacity but only provisioned a few gigabits of capacity on the connection. Many were amazed at the 10 gigabit capacity when they first ordered it since it felt so oversized. They assumed that the connection capacity was going to be good for many years as they added a gigabit or two once in a while.

These ISPs turned out to be wrong, and broadband demand grew to swamp the 10-gigabit connections a lot sooner than expected. It’s not hard to understand why. OpenVault has been reporting on the overall average usage of nationwide customers. According to the OpenVault data, the average broadband consumption for homes and businesses has more than tripled just since the end of 2017. At the end of 2023, the average consumption was 641 gigabytes per customer – a number that ISPs would not have believed a decade ago. However, the size of backbone connections are not based on overall broadband consumption but on the busy hour consumption – the time when an ISP’s network is the busiest. Many small ISPs have told me that busy hour traffic has grown even faster than the average consumption reported by OpenVault.

The final example of broadband demand inflation is the broadband speeds being subscribed by homes and businesses. OpenVault also reports on the subscribed speeds that people are buying nationwide, and reported the following statistics for the end of the years between 2019 and 2023.

This chart shows a rapid migration of households now buying faster broadband connections. Some of the increases came when cable companies unilaterally increased customer speeds. Since 2019, many cable companies increased 100 Mbps subscriptions to 200 or 300 Mbps. The chart also shows a big migration of customers now buying gigabit broadband. There is nobody in the country who predicted in 2019 that in four short years there would be an 11-fold increase in households subscribed to gigabit speeds. Most of these gigabit customers are paying a premium price to get the faster speeds.

There is proof of increasing broadband demand almost everywhere I look. I often talk to businesses that have upgraded to faster speeds only to find out that within a few years they need even more speed. I hear from farmers, photographers, newspapers, and others who send and receive gigantic data files that they are having a problem buying a broadband product that meets their needs.

The Demand for Broadband Usage

My last blog looked at the long-term trajectory of broadband speed. It’s clear that the historical growth of broadband speeds has been at a continuous growth rate of 21% per year – which equates to a 100-fold increase over the last 25 years. Today’s blog looks at the trajectory of demand for broadband usage.

Consider the following statistics that come from OpenVault showing the nationwide average amount of monthly broadband consumed by businesses and residences over the past five years. These numbers combine download and upload usage.

Admittedly, the growth in 2020 was extraordinary due to the pandemic. But there is no question, just like with the bandwidth speeds, that broadband usage has been growing for both homes and businesses. For the last five years, business broadband usage grew by 311% (25.5% per year), and home broadband usage grew by 236% (18.8% per year).

The challenge of looking into the future is predicting the future growth rate of usage demand. The following table looks at two different growth rates. The first two columns assume that future growth is at the same rate of growth from 2022 to 2023 – 11.7% for businesses and 9.4% for residences. The second set of columns looks at a 12.5% growth rate. This table might be one of the best ways to show the incredible impact of compound growth over many years. The residential growth rate of 12.5% is only 33% larger than the 9.4% growth rate, but over 25 years the higher growth rate more than doubles the predicted future demand.

To be conservative, I’ll use the growth from the first two columns in my additional analysis below. But even those growth rates show a 16-time increase in average business usage and a 9-time increase in average residential usage over 25 years. Most folks probably buy the story that in a decade, the average business will use a terabyte of data per month while the average home will use 1.6 terabytes. However, I suspect most people are uncomfortable with a prediction that homes and businesses will use over 5 terabytes per month in 25 years – due to the difficulty of grasping the impact of compound growth.

What do these numbers mean in terms of the amount of bandwidth that our networks have to carry? The following table applies the predicted broadband usage to the number of homes and businesses in the country. The 2018 and 2023 count of homes and businesses comes from the Federal Reserve, and I’ve predicted future homes and businesses on a straight-line growth.

For those not familiar with the term exabytes, the calculation of 90.5 exabytes in 2023 starts with the number of monthly gigabytes being used nationwide, as shown below. Each successive measurement in the table below reflects a difference factor of 1,024. For example, 1 terabyte equals 1,024 gigabytes. The 90.5 exabytes for 2023 could also be stated as:

 

 

 

The table above predicts an overall 12-fold increase in broadband usage over 25 years. Don’t forget that these numbers only come from residential and business broadband usage. There are a lot more sources of broadband, which means that usage on networks will be higher than shown in the table above. Not included in that table are things like data generated from mobile devices, data generated by governments and universities, data generated by outdoor sensors and farming, data generated by self-driving cars and robots, data used to monitor and operate the electric grid and green energy production, and data used to monitor and operate broadband networks. There is good evidence that these other uses of broadband are growing faster than home and business use.

We understand the factors that have contributed to the growth in broadband over the last five years. This includes things like the following:

  • Most of the software that homes and business use is now located in the cloud. A good example is the Microsoft Office suite of software. Five years ago, users ran Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint on software loaded in home and business computers. Today, the majority this software operates in the cloud – meaning the computing is done in Microsoft data centers using a broadband connection.
  • The delivery of online news and similar content has largely migrated to video.
  • A huge percentage of homes and businesses have Internet-connected devices that connect to the cloud. This can be a wide range of devices like computers, tablets, smartphones, TVs, appliances, gaming consoles, burglar alarms, cameras, smoke detectors, etc. A recent survey by Parks Associates reports that the average U.S. home has 17 connected devices. These devices connect to and communicate with the cloud without active intervention from users. This is what is defined as machine-to-machine traffic, meaning devices talk directly to the cloud, and is the fastest growing segment of broadband usage.
  • 30 million homes cut the cord and dropped traditional cable TV in the last five years. These homes now get all video entertainment from online sources. Additionally, the quality of the video has increased significantly as video quality has increased from standard definition, to high definition, to 4K.
  • Other entertainment markets like gaming have moved to the cloud.

Nobody has a crystal ball that can predict how we’ll use broadband 25 years from now. We’re always on the verge of new uses that consume more bandwidth. The migration to high-quality video continues, with web services starting to use 8K video. Spatial computing from devices like the Apple Vision Pro shows the potential for combining virtual and augmented reality with the real world. Probably the biggest change to bandwidth on the immediate horizon is the use of AI throughout the economy.

But it seems inevitable that the demand for broadband usage will continue to grow. It’s hard to imagine a world where the growth in demand would stop. Using a conservative growth rate for broadband demand would increase overall broadband usage by 12- to 15-fold over the next 25 years. It’s not hard to imagine new technologies that could double that future predicted demand.

A New Definition of Broadband

The FCC finally increased the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps. The change was too long in coming. This should have been done when Ajit Pai headed the FCC, but politics got in the way. It should have happened when Congress set the definition to 100/20 Mbps in the BEAD grant rules over two years ago – but again, politics interfered.

Coming four or five years too late, the 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is not only not forward-looking, the new definition of broadband is out of sync with the market. Consider the following table that comes from OpenVault that shows how broadband subscriptions have changed in the country since before the pandemic.

Dec 2019 Dec 2024
Under 50 Mbps 22%  6%
50 – 99 Mbps 24%  4%
100 – 199 Mbps 37% 16%
200 – 499 Mbps 11% 34%
500 – 999 Mbps  4%  7%
1 Gbps  3% 33%

Just before the pandemic, 46% of households were subscribing to speeds under 100 Mbps. Today, only 10% of households buy slower speeds – and many of them are likely in rural areas where they have no other option. The numbers have flipped since the pandemic and 40% of households are now subscribing to speeds of 500 Mbps or faster.

Every time I write a blog about broadband speeds, a few ISPs will respond, saying that people don’t need faster broadband. The first time I heard that sentiment was a unified response from the CEO of every big cable company, who said the same thing when Google upset the market by introducing gigabit broadband. The reality is that it doesn’t matter what people need – what matters is what they are willing to buy. The table above shows that people want to buy faster broadband when given the option. I look at that table, and it’s hard to conclude anything other than the public broadband is something faster than 200 Mbps.

What’s missing in the above chart is any recognition of the importance of upload broadband speeds. I think many consumers who upgrade to faster speeds do so because of issues with upload speeds. Serious gamers and folks who work from home with large data files will tell you that the new 20 Mbps definition of upload broadband is massively obsolete.

Unfortunately, the definition of broadband has political and financial overtones. It determines where grant money can be spent. Upping the definition of broadband also has market consequences. Any ISP that is offering speeds less than 100/20 Mbps today is no longer selling broadband. They might as well be selling dial-up, because even the slow-to-change FCC says that what they are selling is obsolete and is something other than broadband.

It’s hard to say if changing the definition of broadband has any practical impact. It’s possible that this kind of announcement will filter down through the public and cause folks buying slower connections to search for something faster.

The natural question is, what’s the next step in defining broadband? My bet is that the FCC is going to rest on its laurels for a while after finally getting through the politics and making this change. It took nine years to move the definition from 25/3 to 100/20 Mbps. Hopefully, the FCC won’t wait another nine years. Congress already said that 100/20 Mbps is obsolete when it said that federal broadband grants ought to be spent to build gigabit networks. The OpenVault table above says that the public’s desire for gigabit broadband is already here today.

Is There Pent-up Upload Demand?

I was recently asked an interesting question, “It’s easy to understand the growth in download bandwidth due to people streaming higher quality video and similar uses. Why do you think upload broadband usage is growing even faster?”

I first had to check to see if upload bandwidth usage is growing faster than download usage – and it is growing a little faster. According to OpenVault, average upload usage has increased 290% since 2019, while average download usage has increased by 270%. From 2022 to 2023, average upload bandwidth usage increased by 13.3%, while download usage increased by 9.3%. Average U.S. upload usage surpassed 40 gigabytes per customer per month at the end of 2023.

There are some obvious reasons why upload bandwidth usage has been growing. Compared to before the pandemic, Zoom and other video calls have become common. There is now a substantial percentage of people who work from home. Several studies I’ve seen and surveys we’ve conducted show that over 30% of homes have somebody who works at home at least part of each week – with many folks now working from home full time.

Much of the software that we use has migrated to the cloud, and that means folks routinely save documents and spreadsheets online when they work from home. Machine-to-machine language, where our computers and smart devices automatically contact websites is one of the fastest subsets of data usage. We’re using a lot more security cameras. Gaming has moved to the cloud.

But as I’ve been thinking about upload usage, I also think there has been a lot of pent-up demand that is getting slowly resolved as ISPs improve upload speeds. I talk to people about their home bandwidth a lot, and I realized that I probably know a dozen people who have told me that they have to ration upload broadband.

To give one of the more extreme examples, I have a friend in a household with two adults working at home and two older children who often game during the daytime. My friend has to routinely join web video session by cellphone because the home broadband can’t support an additional upload link. You might suppose this home is using a slow technology, but they’ve bought the fastest speed available from a major cable company. The upload bandwidth is just not enough to satisfy this home. If the cable companies upgrades the upload speed, or if fiber becomes available, this home is going to see a big spike in upload usage when family members are no longer blocked. They are routinely using all of the upload bandwidth available today but want to use a lot more.

It turns out that I know a lot of people who routinely have trouble connecting to video calls, and they talk about rationing upload speed. That’s one of the interesting things about this – folks who don’t have enough upload speed are fully aware of the situation. They routinely ask who else in the family is online before connecting. They ask other family members to cut back on usage when they need to make an important connection. It’s classic rationing behavior.

Businesses have this problem to an even greater extent than households. In a lot of communities, businesses are offered the same broadband packages that are sold to homes (but at a much higher price). Many businesses use upload bandwidth far more heavily than homes. They might use VoIP for multiple phone lines. They often want to have multiple people streaming at the same time. A huge percentage of business software and functions use cloud software that needs a constant upload path. Many businesses routinely open a VPN to connect with a distance corporate server. Many of the businesses we interview are acutely aware of the constraints placed on them by inadequate upload speeds.

We’re seeing ISPs bringing faster upload speeds, and this will ease a lot of these problems. Cable companies are upgrading upload speeds in some markets using mid-split upgrades or upgrading to early versions of DOCSIS 4.0. A lot of fiber is being built that offers symmetrical broadband speeds. The upcoming rural broadband grants are going to displace a lot of older and slower technology. As pent-up upload demand is resolved, we should continue to see average upload usage growing faster than download usage over the next few years.

Another New High for Broadband Usage

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.

3Q 2023 Household Broadband Usage

OpenVault just published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the third quarter 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 household usage of broadband in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average U.S. household broadband usage since 2019. These numbers include combined download and upload usage.

Monthly
Gigabytes
3rd Quarter 2019 275.1
3rd Quarter 2020 383.8
3rd Quarter 2021 433.5
3rd Quarter 2022 495.5
3rd Quarter 2023 550.2

We are getting so used to seeing these kinds of statistics that we forget to put increased usage into context. In the third quarter of this year, the average U.S. household used 54.7 more gigabytes of data than one year earlier. That alone is a pretty amazing statistic – 54 gigabytes is a lot of usage in a month. With roughly 120 million residential broadband subscribers, this equates to over 6.5 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than just a year ago. That’s 11% more usage hitting the Internet backbones, just from residential usage.

The following graph shows the average usage of household broadband by quarter, since the beginning of 2019. The overall growth curve has held steady since early 2019.

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

  • The average upload usage per household is 35.9 gigabytes per month. Most homes don’t realize how much data they upload into the cloud every month.
  • Median household broadband usage is 364 gigabytes, up 12.3% from 2022. Half of homes use more than the median, and half use less broadband.
  • OpenVault says the U.S. average download speed is 498 Mbps, and the average upload is 28 Mbps. This is additional proof that the FCC’s proposed 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is already behind the market.