Broadband Power Users Explode, Making Data Caps More Profitable For ISPs (arstechnica.com) 57
The number of broadband "power users" -- people who use 1TB or more per month -- has doubled over the past year, ensuring that ISPs will be able to make more money from data caps. Ars Technica reports: In Q3 2020, 8.8 percent of broadband subscribers used at least 1TB per month, up from 4.2 percent in Q3 2019, according to a study released yesterday by OpenVault. OpenVault is a vendor that sells a data-usage tracking platform to cable, fiber, and wireless ISPs and has 150 operators as customers worldwide. The 8.8- and 4.2-percent figures refer to US customers only, an OpenVault spokesperson told Ars. More customers exceeding their data caps will result in more overage charges paid to ISPs that impose monthly data caps. Higher usage can also boost ISP revenue because people using more data tend to subscribe to higher-speed packages.
The number of "extreme power users," those who use at least 2TB per month, was up to about 1 percent of broadband customers in OpenVault's Q3 2020 data. That's nearly a three-fold increase since Q3 2019 when it was 0.36 percent. OpenVault said the average US broadband household uses 384GB a month, up from 275GB a year ago. The median figures were 229GB, up from 174GB a year ago. Usage increases happen every year, but OpenVault said this year's boost was fueled partly by the pandemic. "While bandwidth usage is remaining relatively flat quarter over quarter, it is not retreating to pre-pandemic levels, indicating that COVID-19-driven usage growth has established a new normal pattern for bandwidth usage," OpenVault said. European usage also went up during the pandemic but remained below US levels, with an average of 225GB and median of 156GB in Q3 2020.
The number of "extreme power users," those who use at least 2TB per month, was up to about 1 percent of broadband customers in OpenVault's Q3 2020 data. That's nearly a three-fold increase since Q3 2019 when it was 0.36 percent. OpenVault said the average US broadband household uses 384GB a month, up from 275GB a year ago. The median figures were 229GB, up from 174GB a year ago. Usage increases happen every year, but OpenVault said this year's boost was fueled partly by the pandemic. "While bandwidth usage is remaining relatively flat quarter over quarter, it is not retreating to pre-pandemic levels, indicating that COVID-19-driven usage growth has established a new normal pattern for bandwidth usage," OpenVault said. European usage also went up during the pandemic but remained below US levels, with an average of 225GB and median of 156GB in Q3 2020.
Had to pay Comcrap another $30/month (Score:3, Informative)
We were flirting with the 1.2TB limit and I didn't want to get hit with a $100 charge for exceeding it. In our area, Comcast has a $30/month option to remove the cap.
I don't know how we went from 300GB at the beginning of the year, to 1.2TB at the end, except perhaps my wife's attempts to watch Amazon Prime Video's entire catalog.
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I'm in the same boat. Even though I torrent, I rarely got close to the old 1TB cap. But now every month I'm having to ration my data come the 20th of each. I suspect that these Zoom meetings eat a lot of data but I've been unable to verify it yet.
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Just open up the Resource Monitor during a call, check how much data Zoom is using per second, and use some simple multiplication to figure it out?
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Same exact thing happened to us with Comcast. Went from about 800Gigs a month to 1.5TB for one month. I freaked out and never wanted an over charge. I called them.
I called them. They quickly talked me into an unlimited plan. I now pay $108.00 USD per month. $108 is about $40 less per month than what we were paying before this.
Moral of the story? Never pretend that you actually understand how a communications company operates.
After all has been said and done, I have never gone over that 1TB limit a
Re: Had to pay Comcrap another $30/month (Score:2)
Moral of the story? Never pretend that you actually understand how a communications company operates.
No, the moral is to educate yourself. They don't start charging for overages until you exceed the 1.2 TB cap at least twice in a rolling 12 month leriod.
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Internet third world country (Score:1)
You mean you still have data cap in the US, and they charge you extra for exceeding it?! Holy shit! Even many mobile plans in the rest of the world only throttle your speed if you exceeded the data cap and do not charge extra.
This is already 2020 now, and the US internet services are still on-par with year 2000 level. Soon, even African continent would surpass the US in internet infrastructure, we may need to call the US the fourth world country.
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Actually, US internet services are totally getting worse. I used to have my choice of many ISP's, was able to get uncapped high speed data for under $60/mo, plus a static IP and TOS that allowed me to run servers. Now you're lucky to get a dynamic NAT'd IPv4, 500GB/mo cap, at $100/mo, with no servers allowed and only two choices of ISP: the phone company or the cable company.
Monopolies are horrible.
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The cost of providing ipv4 is going up, address space is expensive and the alternative is cgnat which can be even more expensive.
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The alternative is IPv6...
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Yeah, but providers are dragging their feet claiming there's no demand (because users don't know what it is - there is no demand for ipv4 either by the same standard), many sites are not available over ipv6 and users don't demand it because they're not aware of the benefits it provides or the global importance of adopting it widely.
Re: Internet third world country (Score:3)
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You mean you still have data cap in the US, and they charge you extra for exceeding it?!
Yes... In places where there is no competition. An additional problem is the currently insane vertical integration in the industry. In many cases the exact same company that owns the wire coming into your house, owns the cable TV franchise in the area, and even owns the content they are trying to sell you on those services (e.g. Time-Warner, Comcast, etc.). Our politicians are too busy accepting campaign contributions from these industries to ever dream of regulating such monopolies meaningfully.
So they
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The proble
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It's a combination of the two...
Even in areas where competition is allowed, new competitors will not enter the market because the cost of building new infrastructure is prohibitive especially when there's an incumbent player who can afford to temporarily lower prices until you go bankrupt.
There are also areas where the alternative to government granted monopoly is no service at all. If not for the guarantee of monopoly, these providers would not have built any infrastructure in those areas at all as it woul
Re:Internet third world country (Score:4, Insightful)
new competitors will not enter the market because the cost of building new infrastructure is prohibitive especially when there's an incumbent player
This means that last-mile Internet connectivity is a natural monopoly the same as water pipes. It really should be run the same way too.
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It is, it should be, and in some locations it is.
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That's how we do it on DSL in the UK. But not on cable.
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Here in Australia I am paying $70/month (Australian Dollars that is) for 50Mbps down on a Fiber-to-the-curb setup with no caps and no throttling (and I am actually getting the full 50Mbps according to speed tests, even at some of the times when there is higher demand)
And I could go up to 100Mbps if I wanted to pay $10 more/month (but I don't need that since I rarely saturate my 50Mbps link now even when downloading big files)
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The US is a very big place so it is hard to generalize about anything here.
I just knew that damn wifi was killin us (Score:2)
Like I told Maw, God only meant man to go at dialup speeds. Try that fancy megabit stuff, it'll blow ya to kingdom come!
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Watching TV == power user? (Score:5, Insightful)
This large amount of data is undoubtedly due to streaming entertainment. So someone who watches a lot of television is now a "power user"? Give me a break.
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Yep, another of the many new bosses for the cord-cutters. I think it'll only be a couple more years before all of their cleverness is gone.
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And data hoarding. Some people enjoy building up enormous collections of every variation or performance of an artist, or _all_ the Star Wars content, and boast about how much they've torrented and have stored. I've had some discussions with temporary roommates, sharing accomodation for a temporary project, where some fool with spare hard drives insisted on using the wifi 24x7 for downloads and interfered with my shared bandwidth for Skype or even SSH.
Employers are paying (Score:2)
Haha what sucker would pay extra for bandwidth (Score:3)
Re:Haha what sucker would pay extra for bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
Since COVID-19 is not over, people are still working from home and keeping children home from school in most nations, there are no "post-pandemic" numbers to draw firm conclusions from.
Shocking (Score:2)
As 4K video is adopted by more and more households, it does not come as a surprise that the amount of bandwidth that is consumed is also on the rise.
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RDP can use a lot of bandwidth especially with high resolutions and lots of graphics...
A video conference is likely to use more than streaming tv since it's sending video in both directions, might be receiving multiple streams depending on the number of users and is more latency sensitive.
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Video conferencing generally uses as little bandwidth as the operators can muster as they can't pull the same tricks Netflix, Hulu, et al, do with CDNs. Which is why video quality tends to be atrocious. 512kbps in both directions isn't atypical. And again, most people are only having occasional video conferences, which are usually no more than 30 minutes long.
This is because the services are centralised, which is due to NAT... A peer to peer video call over SIP or h.323 can be MUCH higher quality and lower latency.
Running a SIP server actually uses very little bandwidth because the way the protocol is designed is that SIP is only used for call setup, the actual video/audio data is routed directly between the endpoints. But this doesn't work when the endpoints can't directly reach each other due to NAT. So you end up with centralised systems with inferior quality
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Except that every mile of that direct connection is a choke point, and a great deal of bulky traffic is delivered over content-delivery-networks which put most of the content in ISP centralized local caches. This is the basis of Akamai and other Amazon content delivery networks, and its performance is improved by centralizing the proxies. NAT helps enforce that, and reduces the edge published upload bandwidth profoundly in favor of centrally served upload that can be optimized.
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CDN is useless for voice/video calls between users, as the traffic still has to be uploaded by the end users and downloaded again by the other participant(s) of the calls - no caching is possible for a live call. Same for gaming, no caching is possible for the actual gameplay traffic and it's latency sensitive.
In many cases the local network is not a choke point at all, for instance in many asian countries you can get fibre to the premises which is capable of 1gbps or even 10gbps speeds locally, but the int
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CDN is nowhere near _as_ helpful for live traffic. The content around it, the icons and images surrounding the display, can benefit from CDN, but you do have a point. Live traffic is also much larger a percentage of Internet traffic than it used to be, I see from a quick check. It's up to 80% according to some articles, so I do see your point.
NAT helps by controlling where the chokepoints can get the necessary proxies installed for CDN, and by reducing the likelihood of people serving bulky content or traff
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NAT doesn't help there at all, you can still place proxies within the ISP networks irrespective of wether the users are coming from routable addresses or through NAT. NAT just creates an extra unnecessary chokepoint and causes other problems. NAT is also a significant cost to provide, both for the extra equipment as well as the associated logging of traffic that's required in order to comply with laws in most countries. And once the ISP starts logging all your connections, they will start trying to find way
Damn! (Score:5, Funny)
I never knew using the Internet could be that dangerous!
I'd better disconnect right now before something bad happ{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER
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Just stay clear of broadband power and you won't explode, obviously it's not safe yet.... Oh, too late.
Broadband Power, not Broadband Power-Line (Score:2)
I'm actually kind of surprised we don't see more of these outside the niche market. They're a reasonable way of carrying data between rooms.
Can someone make me an ATX power supply that has a powerline adapter built in to it and just throws it straight onto the motherboard? That would be rad.
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But then angry ham operators will come over and beat you with their zimmer frames.
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Can someone make me an ATX power supply that has a powerline adapter built in to it and just throws it straight onto the motherboard? That would be rad.
Sure, just use a usb to powerline adapter [amazon.com] and USB type B to header cable [amazon.com], it will be trivial. If you don't have an iron, have someone rework the module for you. The stuff inside the power supply can be done with crimpers once you have flat quick disconnects on the powerline adapter instead of the existing receptacle connectors.
If you literally want someone to do it for you, drop me an email.
Cable TV is the big reason... (Score:3)
In the US pretty much all the major providers of Internet also sell "Cable TV" (whether that be delivered over coax cable, fibre or whatever other technology, its still the same thing) and so they have a vested interest in making it harder for consumers to replace Cable TV with all these new alternatives (Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Hulu etc etc) and a vested interest in making it harder for new players to enter the market (players who don't have a vested interest in propping up a last-century dinosaur Cable TV business model)
OpenVault declared pandemic is over??? (Score:3)
They said: "While bandwidth usage is remaining relatively flat quarter over quarter, it is not retreating to pre-pandemic levels, indicating that COVID-19-driven usage growth has established a new normal pattern for bandwidth usage,"
So their research indicates that the pandemic is over, which is why they expected the usage levels would drop to pre-pandemic numbers? If the pandemic drove the numbers up, and is still not over, why would the numbers go down? Is there a huge one time download pandemic package everyone is downloading only at the start of a pandemic that I missed?
It's statements like this which immediately discredit any other research conclusions from the same source, at least to me.
Re: OpenVault declared pandemic is over??? (Score:2)
"While bandwidth usage is remaining relatively flat quarter over quarter, it is not retreating to pre-pandemic levels, indicating that COVID-19-driven usage growth has established a new normal pattern for bandwidth usage,"
So their research indicates that the pandemic is over
I think you misinterpreted that. Just because behaviors changed due to an ongoing problem doesn't mean those behaviors will stick, even while the problem is still ongoing. TP hoarding stopped right? In an alternate universe, we could be going back to offices and classrooms in greater numbers by taking appropriate measures, and then you might see a decrease in broadband usage. We're not, which seems kind of obvious, and that's probably why they're seeing the data they see. Also, you missed what they sai
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Bandwidth is not exactly like toilet paper, you cannot stock up. It's more like electricity or water - people start spending more time at home, they use more electricity and water. People are still stuck at home, why would anyone expect the usage will drop to levels when people spent majority of their days out of the house? Same for bandwidth - I don't get why anyone would expect the bandwidth usage to drop back to the old numbers while the reasons for increased usage are still present. It would be like say
retreating to pre-pandemic levels (Score:3)
I wonder how much of the increase is consumers not being able to use the network at their workplace since they are home?
Most unfortunate (Score:1)
Where's the demand for no caps and reasonable prices? I mean, without that, you're fucked.
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South Park brought this up years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Silly Americans (Score:3)