posted by
mrpg
on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:12AM
from the B-b-b-b-but-Information-Wants-to-be-FREE! dept.
from the B-b-b-b-but-Information-Wants-to-be-FREE! dept.
1TB `Power Users' Double to 4.12% of All Households:
According to OpenVault, both average and median data usage for year end 2018 increased when compared with year end 2017 statistics. Importantly, the rate of growth for median usage continued to far exceed the growth rate for average usage, indicating that consumption is growing across service providers' entire subscriber bases, rather than only among heavy users.
OpenVault's year end 2018 data showed that:
- Average usage for all households was 268.7GB/HH in 2018, up from 226.4GB/HH at the end of June 2018 and a 33.3% increase over the YE 2017 average of 201.6GB/HH.
- Median usage was 145.2GB/HH in 2018, up from 116.4GB/HH in June 2018 and a 40% increase over the YE 2017 median of 103.6GB/HH.
- The percentage of power users – defined as those households using 1TB or more – almost doubled in 2018, rising to 4.12% of all households from 2.11% in 2017, while the percentage of households exceeding 250GB rose to 36.4% from 28.4% during the same timespan.
How much data do YOU use each month?
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1 TB Bandwidth "Power Users" Double to 4.12% of All Households
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday January 24 2019, @08:06AM (8 children)
1TB doesn't sound very far fetched for a household that contain a few people, say two adults and two children. First there is all the normal work- and webstuff -- surfing, the facebook and the youtube, add in all the streaming of video (beyond the normal youtubeing) and audio (spotify and such). Perhaps you have make your "phonecalls" as part of you bandwidth to (not only skype etc). I think they can pass 1 TB without any issues in a month.
1TB might not even be all that much for a somewhat active person, some online gaming, the usual streaming of audio and video of your choice, perhaps some normal amount of bittorrent usage (for those super important linux distros .. *cough*cough*) and the usual surfing. I imagine you would blow right past the 1TB mark in no time at all.
How much data do I use in each month? Hard to say since it is split between home, work and mobile. Very low mobile usage, work usage unknown (not my problem). At home? I'm probably just shy or around the 1TB mark in a month, give or take a few GB. The ISP has not complained as of yet anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @08:28AM (4 children)
If 1080p streaming is 8 Mbps, 1 TB is 11.5 days. Even a family each watching stuff separately may be hard pressed to hit that.
Although it's far from impossible, you have to be pretty motivated to download a few hundred gigabytes a month. Chances are you don't need all of whatever you're grabbing.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:07AM
OK, let's do the calculation.
11.5 days is 276 hours. Let's say we've got a family of four, that's 89 hours per person; let's make that 90 hours for more easy calculation. Taking 30 days per month, this gives 3 hours per person and day. Certainly not impossible.
Assume 4K instead of 1080p (i.e. 4 times the data rate), and the limit is reached by four people watching 45 minutes per day each.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @11:55AM (2 children)
You also forget games, games updates, OS updates, other applications, music, and all the other things that all add up.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:28PM (1 child)
Someone got a new laptop for Christmas. Has to run Windows on it.
I plugged it in the Gig-E port at the back of my dad's fiber box before letting it do a Win update.
A minute later, the update is done downloading and starts installing. I was checking the port usage : That was a 3GB update !
Yup, for less than 20 Euros a month, they really do have 500Mb/s down (200 up). That hurts.
1TB ? Well, if you could keep that rate up (few peers will send you sustained 500Mb/s), apparently they'd reach a TB in about 5 hours. The math does check out, but usually the "down rate" advertised is hard to achieve. A One Drive backup that big would be a rare case where it works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:14PM
What kind of faggy european shithole do they live in? (and how hard is it to get a visa?)
(Score: 2, Disagree) by isostatic on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:01AM (1 child)
All our TV viewing is via internet (netflix, iplayer, amazon). All our radio is via internet (tunein). I work from home, as does my wife.
Our maximum download in a single day averaged 3mbit, or about 30GB over the 24 hour period. Average is about 6GB a day, or 200GB a month.
Passing 1TB/month, or 30GB a day, is not in any way normal for a 'somewhat active person'.
However median usage of 145GB a year? Or 400MB a day? That sounds pitiful. I could believe median usage of 145GB a month, or even 50GB a month (600GB a year), but 145 a year? You're having a laugh.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:58AM
Wow, you download only up to three millibits per day? That makes about one bit per year! ISPs must love you! :-)
No, wait, now I get it: You don't speak about the amount of data, but the amount of information in that data! ;-)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 24 2019, @06:16PM
Online gaming takes very little bandwidth and thus doesn't account for much of the total usage. What does use a lot of data is downloading the game and/or updates. Though, even then, that depends on what game(s) you get. Terraria is less than 1GB to download, while Fallout 4 is over 10GB to download. Sure, Terraria has multiplayer, but assuming you're using cloud saves. You can easily use more data for the single-player offline game Fallout 4 than Terraria. Since, the save files for Terraria are miniscule and it doesn't use a lot of bandwidth for multiplayer. While Fallout 4 save games are much, much larger files. I ran into this recently, since my connection is kind of shoddy, so I have taken to limiting myself to a few save game files. So SteamVR doesn't take forever to sync the cloud saves. In contrast, streaming Video or Audio uses a lot more bandwidth, since they can do things like buffering. Which would not make for a good real-time (FPS/Arcade/Etc) game.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Thursday January 24 2019, @08:33AM (2 children)
TB != bandwidth. And if 4% of users were on 1TB/s downlinks, I'd be decidedly jealous, stuck here on my ADSL2+.
(Score: 3, Informative) by darkfeline on Friday January 25 2019, @07:44PM (1 child)
Technically speaking, bitrate isn't bandwidth either. Bandwidth is a measurement of range (the width of a band), such as the bandwidth of radio frequencies, or the bandwidth of frequencies through a solid material, or the bandwidth of spectral emissions. For example, copper has a specific bandwidth of frequencies within which you can reliable transfer information. Of course, if you abuse a word enough, you can give it a new definition in the form of a scar.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Saturday January 26 2019, @02:52AM
You are entirely correct, have a mod point :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:29AM (7 children)
Just that - what is an "HH"?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Magic Oddball on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:28AM
I was confused by that as well, but my guess is that it's supposed to mean "household."
(Score: 2) by rigrig on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:31AM
My guess would be "HouseHold", and these figures indicating total traffic over the whole year?
No one remembers the singer.
(Score: 1) by messymerry on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:11PM (2 children)
I wnet to the article, and looked high and low and HH does not come up in association with data usage. HouseHold seems a reasonable guess to me, butt, I am old and we were taught to never use and acronym without letting our dear readers know what it meant.
What has happened to "good manners in writing?"
;-D
Only fools equate a PhD with a Swiss Army Knife...
(Score: 2, Informative) by woodcruft on Thursday January 24 2019, @12:32PM (1 child)
It's not only good manners but common sense.
If it's not an SI unit & in particular if it's not one in common usage then say what the hell it is.
The reader is left to speculate what "HH" stands for. If it's for 'household', then for what time period? We have to have a guess there too.
All TFA has done is just left me annoyed at having bothered to read it. Complete waste of bytes.
:wq!
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday January 24 2019, @06:19PM
Worry not, those good forms were discarded on the road to l33t and txt speak.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @02:18PM
Heil Hitler
(Score: 2) by jb on Friday January 25 2019, @05:58AM
In the metric system "H" stands for "Henry", a unit of inductance. Therefore "HH" must mean "square Henry".
"Gigabytes per square Henry" strikes me as a rather odd unit to choose though. Is there really any meaningful relationship between the inductance of an end user and how much bandwidth he consumes?
Reproducing those results might make a fun research project...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @09:36AM
i use (fixed line) bandwidth until the connection "mysteriously" develops problems.
after contacting the call center and declining the GPON offer -aka- "wifi in a glass pipe" for x-teen time the "problem" resolves itself just as mysteriously after a day or two...
the first two times a technician showed up and finding nothing wrong resolved the problem with a telephon call.
i suspect some "breaker" in the datacenter trips after noticing that (torrent) traffic has no dns component (dht) ^_^
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday January 24 2019, @10:48AM
Before my mother became hooked on audiobooks, her video-watching habit meant that we routinely pulled down maybe 200-300gb/month. Since she switched over, though, we've been going through 30-70gb/month instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24 2019, @01:15PM
Feb '18.....48.05 GiB
Mar '18.....83.69 GiB
Apr '18.....74.62 GiB
May '18....115.13 GiB
Jun '18....137.23 GiB
Jul '18....184.65 GiB
Aug '18....211.65 GiB
Sep '18....201.51 GiB
Oct '18....221.25 GiB
Nov '18....177.12 GiB
Dec '18....199.48 GiB
Jan '19....456.30 GiB
(spot which month my invalided sister first discovers the joys of Youtube..)
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday January 24 2019, @03:29PM (1 child)
I'm a power user.
My Internet is a 40Gb/month 4G stick. It does everything I need to do. In "high traffic" months, then I can add on maybe 10Gb via other SIMs or an extra package.
It's the only Internet connection I have.
Up until this year, all my TV was also online - via catchup, TVPlayer, Netflix, etc. Even accounting for the special deal the telecoms provider had with those companies so I didn't have to pay for their traffic, I only ever burnt through 80Gb a month, max.
I game - 1000 games on my Steam account, and I play online. All my devices (Chromecast, Steam Link, laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc.) all connect only via that same box. I don't have a traditional telephone, a TV, etc. so everything is done online.
This year, I put an RPi with a DVB add-on into my house. It does exactly what TVPlayer did... better... for free... over Wifi (so it doesn't use my traffic). Ironically, I can now watch my home TV while I'm out and about and suck the data the other way (i.e. my RPi uploading the DVB streams to my smartphone, rather than downloading it from TVPlayer etc.).
So... it makes me wonder what an average household is doing with some 6 times that data. Let alone people using 24 times that data.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love a higher limit. But I do think that we're not actually doing anything practical with all that.
And there's a case to be made for in-house caching too... in my workplaces, we can easily save 33-50% of our bandwidth with local web caching (not to mention Windows Update caching etc.). I'm sure the ISPs do the same. But they are still charging you twice when you download the same update on two computers minutes apart because there's no local caching.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 24 2019, @07:36PM
> it makes me wonder what an average household is doing with some 6 times that data.
Netflix, Youtube, and Porn, in glorious HD or 4K ...
Met lots of people (see below) who leave the TV on essentially 24/7, whether they are watching or not, or not even home. It adds up.
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Thursday January 24 2019, @06:20PM (1 child)
I live in a household of three adults. We use an average of 2.5 terabytes per month.
We cut the cable cord fourteen months ago. Now we stream everything. One television is on about 20 hours a day, streaming video at a minimum of 720p at 60 FPS. Then there is a second television that is used a couple of hours per day on average, also streaming video at a minimum of 720p at 60 FPS. When we watch movies, we tend to stream them in 4K Ultra HD, which is about five or six hours per week.
Then there are the 75 gigabyte video game downloads, multiple five gigabyte video game patches, streaming music and podcastas nearly nine hours a day, occasional backups to Nextcloud...
(Score: 2) by Apparition on Thursday January 24 2019, @06:39PM
I forgot to mention that I work from home two days a week, and that my family and my sister's family video conference in 1080p about four hours per week on average. Personally, I would prefer telephone calls but my nephews insist on video calls as that is what they are growing up on.