Tag Archives: power users

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.