Typical Home Bandwidth Usage?

Broadband writes "With a growing number of internet service providers imposing hard bandwidth caps, I too will soon find myself with a limit. In typical Slashdot fashion I use the Internet for everything from movie streaming to online backup and just realized I have no idea how much data traverses my pipes on a monthly basis. While I have wised up and installed a bandwidth monitoring solution, it'll be some time until I have a normalized average. So my question is: What is the average monthly data usage in your household? How many people share the connection and is there anything you've found essential yet bandwidth intensive that you couldn't live without? (E.g. VOIP, movie downloads, streaming audio, etc.)"

first proust!

For a long time I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say "I'm going to sleep." And half an hour later the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me; I would try to put away the book which, I imagined, was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had been thinking all the time, while I was asleep, of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own, until I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between FranÃois I and Charles V. This impression would persist for some moments after I was awake; it did not disturb my mind, but it lay like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as the thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no; and at the same time my sight would return and I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes, and even more, perhaps, for my mind, to which it appeared incomprehensible, without a cause, a matter dark indeed.

Re:first proust!

Have you been saving that up in some kind of .txt file, waiting for your chance at first post?

It's a quote from Proust.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/proust.htm [kirjasto.sci.fi]

Hence the subject "First Proust!"

If Monty Python had made this joke anyone repeating it here would have got modded up.

I guess my ISP is responsiblee

When my ISP added caps, they started by giving statements of the last three months of each person's usage, and did that for a few months before adding the cap. It made life quite nice.

Turns out, I rarely go over 20GB in a month. I was basically two persons: one 14 year old girl watching youtube, facebook, and uploading hundreds of photographs; while I run a programming business downloading software and uploading text files.

Don't know if that helps.

Re:I guess my ISP is responsiblee

I was basically two persons: one 14 year old girl watching youtube, facebook, and uploading hundreds of photographs; while I run a programming business downloading software and uploading text files.

Well, at least now we have one data point for the typical bandwith usage of a small Russian mafia operation.

150GB

I already have a cap (Yes I'm Australian, don't start the whole "OMG WE'RE SICK OF AUSTRALIANS IN SLASHDOT" BS. We're the best friends you'll have now since we've been on caps for years and can tell you how best to stay within them). It's a relatively large one compared to others, domestically at 150GB. I use it all up mainly on torrents for things like movies, games and the odd program and Linux iso.

It's not hard to monitor usage especially if most of it comes through downloads and not through browsing. Browsing can be a killer. Especially these days when a lot of sites have embedded video ads. Those, plus 5-10MB animated .gif's that you don't expect can really eat into your bandwidth. Best solution is Firefox with Adblocker and NoScript. Will save you a lot of headache when you check your usage and wonder "Where did all these GB's come from!".

Paying to view ads

Those, plus 5-10MB animated .gif's that you don't expect can really eat into your bandwidth. Best solution is Firefox with Adblocker and NoScript.

When your usage is caped, you start to realize that you are _PAYING_ to view those annoying banners.

No limit

I donÂt have any limit but i upload/download around 2 TB /month, I have a no limit 100/100 Mbit connection that is shared by 2 peoples. I have static IP and I am allowed to run servers. I pay 99 swedish kronor for the connection, that is like 15,10 USD

Re:No limit

I guess there should be a "-5 Swedish" option when talking about home network connections.

In their eastern neighbour Finland I pay about ... 0-10€ per month 1Mbps (HomePNA) line. (I'm yet to receive a bill for that connection after 9 months, no idea if they have just forgot me or if it's included in the rent.)

Sweden is not the riches country in the world but somehow they have been able to pull great stunt making Internet truly "free" for everyone.. As in you don't have to have incomes that allow you to pay 1000€ per month for a such connection.

Where I live a 10/10 Mbps (fiber) connection with no restraints costs about 1000€/month plus 1500€ installation.

I don't like bandwidth caps...

I always put a conscious effort to monitor my usage but

Does your ISP already know?

If your ISP has accounts with caps, then the chances are they'll have a page where people can go check the usage on their accounts. Log in to your ISP's 'Customer Portal' if they have one, and you can probably find out.

I've got an uncapped account and my provider has this - they've got historical data going back to May 2006.

50GB Down & 5GB Up

50GB Down & 5GB Up (average)
100GB Down & 4GB Up (this month)

Skype has replaced my phone
Joost & legal sites have replaced my Cable TV
Streaming music all day long
Games - online shooters
Web Browsing/RSS feeds

Surprisingly little

The average household really won't use much bandwidth. I was surprised by this, when my parents got broadband a couple of years ago - even with 4 persons at home (not including me), they used only some 250 MB (download) per month. In fact, they often used more upload than download, because of sending photo's to an online photo printing service.

They do use e-mail and the web really quite a lot (hours a day), also my younger brothers play (online) games all the time, both browser-based and otherwise.

This was a couple of years ago when youtube didn't exist yet; I'd assume the bandwidth usage would be a bit higher now. But unless you start downloading movies (they rent DVD's instead) and lots of music, you don't use a whole lot apparently.

I used to share an apartment with 2 other students; we averaged about 1 GB/day, including lots of messing about with Linux distro's and the like, but obviously not just that.

So I don't know, I'd rather have the 250 GB/month cap than some undefined FUP. It's hardly like 250 GB is a completely unreasonable limit. You will never unconsciously download that much, except perhaps if you're trying to keep up with alt.binaries.* on a daily basis or something.

(The problem is of course that once there is a strictly defined limit, given the usual lack of competition they will keep lowering it unless you are willing to pay more)

Download caps are not as bad as they are made out

Hi all. My first post on Slashdot even though I've been reading it since the late 90s. Finally got around to signing up. I'm Australian and as most Slashdotters know, Australian ISPs all impose caps.

Personally, I'm on a 25 GB per month cap (after which my speed is slowed, but I am not charged more). My monthly usage generally ends up at around 18-22 GB, without me needing to monitor my usage or worry about it. My connection supports 2 people who are both heavy browsers. Plenty of youtube, streaming radio etc. Perhaps a TV show from a torrent every second day. Skype on the weekends to call my family overseas.

Basically, unless you are a MAJOR torrent leecher, you will find that you won't have any problems whatsoever staying under 250 GB (Comcast). I have one tenth of that cap, download movies/TV shows every other day, surf heavily, run a home FTP server, but I have no issues staying under 25 GB. Keep in mind that my uploads are not capped (not sure if Comcast's 250 GB includes uploads or not).

A poster above mentioned the issue of people launching attacks on your connection that flood you with unrequested packets. Yes this would be counted against your usage. But I've never heard of it being an issue...certainly hasn't happened to me in my 8+ years of using capped broadband. In the very unlikely circumstance that it did happen, call the ISP and they will be able to see the attack in their logs, and here, they would be reasonable and not charge you for it.

Now onto the subject of why I think caps, provided they are clearly stated, are generally a good thing!

Contrary to some people's knee-jerk reaction however, the reason Australia has caps is not because it's a technology backwater. Far from it actually - DSL speeds here are generally faster than in most parts of the US (although I admit, FiOS rocks, where it's available).

Australian bandwidth caps basically exist because:

a) most English speaking content comes from the US (i.e. most traffic is international, vs mostly domestic in the US); and

b) we are an island a long way from anywhere. Those undersea cables don't pay for themselves. Peering and transit costs here a an order of magnitude higher than in the US. ISPs thus have to impose monthly download caps to stop a few high volume users sending them bankrupt.

But on the plus side, because we pay for what we use, there are a number of advantages. My ISP, like most in Australia:

- Is far less contended than most US ISPs. Download speeds are always meet my connected speed. I have an 8/1 Mbps connection, and I get that speed, all the time (~850 kb/s downstream and slightly over 100 kb/s up). Whereas some US ISPs, when I've used them, seem sluggish in peak hours.

- Never fiddles with my traffic. No bittorrent deprioritising, no deep packet inspection, no random throttling or any of that nonsense. In the US though, well you know all about the shenanigans some of your ISPs have been up to.

- Allows me to run anything whatsoever on my connection. Whereas most US DSL providers I have read the AUP for have 20 clauses about how you cant run servers etc.

The other thing to note is that because we get charged for what we use, ISPs can allow us faster speeds here, without worrying that we will completely trash their network by leeching 24/7. In the US, your DSL connections mostly seem to be 3 or 6 Mbps, with maybe 768kbps up. In Australia, DSL is generally from 8, up to 24 Mbps down (ADSL2+), and if you have Annex M support on your modem/ISP, you can get up to 2.5 Mbps upload. Personally, I'd rather faster speeds with a cap, than slow speeds but unlimited downloads and annoying packet tampering.

The final thing to note is that virtually all ISPs here have massive download mirrors which aren't counted against your quota. For instance, my ISP has full Sourceforge, MajorGeeks etc. mirrors that contain most large things I would ever want to download anyway.

So yeah - don't fear your (very generous!) download caps over there. It's good news for you. Get the 0.1% of people off the network that abuse the hell out of it, and speeds will be faster for the rest of you.

Re:Download caps are not as bad as they are made o

They only get laid once. Then they get used repeatedly. I'm sure they pay for themselves & then some.

That phrase is the perfect description of Slashdot as a whole.

Check your router/firewall

Most half-decent routers and firewalls keep rudimentary port statistics. According to my router I'm using about 30GB per month on my ADSL2+ line, and my family does little or no movie/music downloads. But I do run remote desktop sessions and remote backup (rsync) on the link and I get ISO's occasionally.

avg 25~GB /mo last 6mos

lots of VoIP ..fair amount of gaming .. fair amount of downloading distros / patches / updates..etc lots of Streaming audio.. ummm some streaming video

2x people (who frequently work from home via VPN connection back to respective offices.)

I have been shocked a how little our usage actually is

still I'm not thrilled about a cap ... but OTOH wasn't TW talking about testing a lot low cap than this?

Emegency VoIP?

One thought... What if you have VoIP and need to go an emegency call after you've been blocked? Doesn't phone companies have some responsibility to keep up the service so that you can make such calls?

Re:I have true unlimited

Ahem, Speakeasy...

Ok well full disclosure i work for Speakeasy but there are no bandwidth caps. Of course you pay more for service but you get lower latency, no bandwidth cap and i can personally attest that all the backbone lines that speakeasy runs on are undersold compared to other ISPs.

Like anyhting in life you pay for what you get. If you pay $20 a month for internet expect to get $20 worth.

Re:I have true unlimited

Same here i have true unlimited, Be internet in the UK. i never watch my bandwidth usage i just checked it now and it was 536.2GB combined for last month.

Re:I have true unlimited

I'm probably close to a TB some months. I can easily fill a 250GB drive in three to four days. My ISP doesn't cap and has never complained to me (I don't speak their language, anyway). I don't know the max speed on my line because it keeps going up, but I'm going to guess 8-10Mb/s right now. My friend has got 100Mb/s for the same price I pay, but I'm too lazy to change providers and the one I've got now is good enough.

I doubt I'd find a use for that speed, anyway.

Weird ass restrictions

There doesn't seem to be any restrictions around here. It's never been verboten to run servers, or download/upload as much as you can.
That's because my ISP [www.free.fr] has heavily invested in its infrastructure, and the results are ... positive [iliad.fr] (pdf).
If US ISPs spent half as much on lawyers and lobbyists, maybe they could afford bigger series of pipes.

Re:I have true unlimited

I get dsl through sonic.net. They are a AT&T reseller, but with huge advantages.

Like tech support from a hedgehog with blue spiky hair?

Re:I have true unlimited

I wish they would expand their fiber offering down my way (Dublin). I'd kill for that.

Sonic tech support is the best I've ever seen. When I first signed up and was on the phone for basic info (like ip address, dns, etc) they asked "what operating system are you running?" I gritted my teeth and answered honestly, "Linux." Instead of the usual "we don't support that," the response was, "Cool! What distro?" When they lost one of their major switches, I called to ask them if the problem was on my end or their end (at this point I didn't know it was a dead switch), the owner of the company took my call! They didn't act stupid or pretend nothing was wrong. They told me they had a hardware failure and expected everything back to normal in 30 minutes to an hour. The had things back up nearer to the low end of the estimate. I'm sure you know all this since you are a customer. I'm telling this for everyone else's benefit so they will consider signing up with sonic.

Finally, they never pretend everything is perfect and they never have a problem. Information about problems and outages are always published on their website. I don't expect perfection. I love a company that is honest. I will stick with sonic for a long time.

Re:I have true unlimited

I have to admit, I had a look at your homepage just to make sure it wasn't sonic.net ;)

Re:I have true unlimited

Oh for fucks sake. Comcast is putting a 250GB cap on it. I, in Canada have a Shaw business account with the X-Treem or whatever it is option that gives me a grand total of 130GB a month transfer. I run a web server at home, I also run a backup server that backs up no less than 3 remote sites to my place twice a week just for geographical distribution (house is about 35 miles from downtown). I also download a bunch of things including audiovisual entertainments, and other things, surf the web, have people try and break in to my webserver, and a hundred other things. And I never exceed my cap. Ever. Once, with 5 days to go, and Shaw's customer service site reporting that my monthly usage was only 30GB that month, I thought to myself just for fun, I should see how much I can download in 5 days, after all that's 100GB going to waste, right :). Didn't put more than a moderate dent in it.

You, if you are doing what you describe above will NEVER "blow the bandwidth cap". Especially if it's twice what I can't use up.

The only way this will inconvenience anyone is if they are not a "moderate or heavy surfer" and are in fact running torrent downloads 24/7/365 pulling a constant load of 100kBps or more.

Think about this. Comcast's cap is 250GB, yes? There is 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days. 250,000 MB / 2,592,000 = .096451. That means to exceed your cap, you must have a constant network load of .096 megabytes PER SECOND all month. I SERIOUSLY doubt that's the case if you are using it as described.