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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.)"
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.
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.
Use about 20-25 gigs a month on just surfing/gaming thats before any mentionable sized downloads like big patches for online goes, or torrents
This especially sucks as my tightwad ISP gives us a 30 gig cap on a 10mb line unless i'd care to shell out 100 bucks more a month (my current bill is only 50) to get a 60 gig cap.
bandwidth-intensive and essential stuff: none except occasional heavy youtube usage (example), but I'm impatient, so I have a fast connection. Also planning on using Freenet at some point in the future (on principle, because I dislike the current trends in wiretapping legislation).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Bandwidth is not usage, it is a rate.
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
Hence the subject "First Proust!"
If Monty Python had made this joke anyone repeating it here would have got modded up.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
another aussie here. I have to live with 10gig onpeak and 10 gig off peak, for a pc, laptop, and online gaming with a wii and xbox360 (inc dlc and game&sytem updates) 4 of the past 6 months I've gone over our cap and we get downgraded to a 64kbps connection until our monthly quota resets. I hardly ever download music or movies, however I do like to watch about 30min average of youtube/other streaming vids/day average.
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.
The "cap" for my New Zealand flat is 10GB ($55), of which I use about 4GB/month, most of which is Debian updates. If we go over that, it's $3/GB (note: prices in NZD). However, I do spend most of my day at the local university, and don't need to pay [an additional amount on top of my standard fees] for Internet access there.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
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
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)
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
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?
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
same here. I have elite from sonic.
If I was in Santa Rosa, Sonic's home-turf, I could get fiber for 130 a month (with even faster speeds, up and down).
plus, the tech support with Sonic is actually fairly pleasant. If I ask them what my signal-to-noise ratio is on my dsl line, they don't scratch their heads and fling poo....they actually know what is going on.
I get 160gb on Adam Internet, 80gb external (outside of PIPE traffic and similar) and 80gb internal traffic (inside PIPE).
Also I do heaps of uploading and downloading from CommunityNet, which is awesome.
If you live in SA, I'd recommend it.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I can't believe the ISPs in the US still give you bandwidth limits. This is what I have in France, for 35/month : - ADSL 1 (10 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream. Had my DSLAM been ADSL2+ compatible, I'd have 28 Mbps downstream for the same price) - VoIP with calls free of charge to 30 major countries (including US, Canada, North Africa and the European Union) - About 15 Multicast (IPTV) channels - Built in Unicast (VoD) service (3/24 hours for newer movies) - No bandwidth limitation - No traffic shaping I have about 50 Gb of monthly traffic (two persons in the household). Of course I am "allowed" to host webservers and such if I want to. I use one of the most expensive ISP (Orange), other ISPs are at 29.99/month. One of them even has a MIMO set top box. If I was one of the lucky guys with Fiber To The Home, I'd have a 50 Mbps *symetric* bandwidth, for about 50/month, and the same services. If I had cable, I'd get 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream, for 30/month (same services, as well).
It takes a good 10-15 years to recover the cost actually. But the ISPs aren't shafting us, I don't think. A decent sized download allowance is very affordable (which wasn't the case 5 years ago, but things are a lot better now).
Also we literally can't build international links quick enough to keep up with the rapid increase in traffic over the last few years (youtube etc.). In the long term, they will pay for themselves but it DOES take a long time.
Remember, you are building a 10,000 km long cable to service an Australian population less than a single large US city.
Well, I also live in Finland. I used to have free (included in house maintenance fees) HomePNA but that was crap so now I have 24/2 ADSL. It costs 40+ something euros per month. It is not capped as far as I know. I pay for fast downloads rather than downloading huge amounts of stuff, so i wouldn't know.
A more serious answer: /., read fark, and the news, plus watch random youtube videos, play games (that maybe I need to download via a content delivery system)... standard geek pursuits. On top of that, assume I have a normal work schedule (well, at least 8 hours a day). To pre-empt the "what about those that work from home" argument: they should pay for business class if they're doing business.
5-10 gigs per heavy person, per day. I say this based on the following:
Assuming I wanted to download h.264 encoded videos, and that I wanted to read
I sleep from 3am-9am on weekdays, and 4am-1pm on weekends. Assuming I can watch a video a day on the weekdays, that's 10 hours on a weekday of video at about 800 megs/hour (pretty high quality). On the weekends, let's face it, I sit around and watch seasons of episodes (fortunately for my bandwidth, costco has seasons of stuff for like...20 bucks), assuming my gf doesn't want me to actually be productive around the house ;). That's about 15 gigs a day worth of television to rot my brain. Adding this up, we get 38 gigs a week plus an additional 2-3 gigs for standard surfing, or approximately 5.75 gigs per day. This gives 172.5 gigs per month for me, a single (heavy) user. For a "home" with multiple family members who aren't all computer geeks, I'd say about 1/4 of my monthly usage per person, tops. This means a family of four would use about what I, alone, do.
As for my bandwidth logs... they say I use about 5 gigs/day on average... Not too far off my estimates.
Be* have there own LLU network, so don't pay BT by volume, only for the physical phone lines.
Be appears to have been set up specifically to cater to high bandwidth/geeky users. I just switched from Virgin precisely because of this; when I told them where I was going Virgin stopped trying to hold on to me - I don't think they don't want that kind of customer. Especially one that's bothered by their interference with the mail.
That said, I don't think the kind of bandwidth caps which are coming into force in the US are unreasonable - 250GB is quite a lot; I'm pretty sure I don't get anywhere near that in a month. Full disclosure, that's the key.
I was a Speakeasy customer for about 3 years.
... a Best Buy employee. Are you wearing one of their shirts when you pick up the phone and answer, "Speakeasy"?
Then they were bought by Best Buy. I learned about it right here on Slashdot. It took me a while but I dropped them by the end of that year. And yes, my decision to drop them was based 100% on who their new owner was.
In my area, Speakeasy had always just been a reseller of Covad's services. So, I went with Covad instead and cut out the middle-man. It's been about a year now and I have no complaints. The only thing I had trouble with was technician incompetence during the installation. I had a similar experience during the installation of my original Speakeasy service (which, as I said, was always just re-sold Covad service, so it came as no surprise to me).
Just like it was with Speakeasy though, once the installation stupidity had been bulldozed through, everything has been fine with Covad.
I will do everything I can to avoid supporting the Best Buy corporation. Hence no more money of mine will go to Speakeasy. They are absolutely not the company they used to be.
It doesn't surprise me at all that a Best Buy employee would post here with praise for their Speakeasy brand. That's what you are, anonymous coward
Whoever designed level 61 in Frozen Bubble is a sadistic bastard.
I'd be very surprised if your usage rate was that high. When I was in Australia and we actually had bandwidth caps (significantly lower than the 250GB limit Comcast is imposing) and the ability to monitor our usage was provided by the ISP, I didn't get anywhere near that. YouTube doesn't use up more than a few hundred MB per day, if that, and general browsing and work certainly doesn't use up 2-3GB per week.
I guess, if you're constantly downloading high definition 720p or 1080p TV/Blu-ray rips, then maybe fair enough. I know an average 720p 40 min TV episodes are about 1GB each, and a blu-ray rip is generally 8-15GB. It would also depend on whether your ISP counts uploads too, and how much you seed torrents. My ISP in Australia didn't count or limit uploads at all.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but the police departments here have two phone numbers: a non-emergency and an emergency. The emergency number is not 911. So, even if 911 isn't supported by a company, the emergency number can be programmed to speed dial.
[...] 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.)
[...] Where I live a 10/10 Mbps (fiber) connection with no restraints costs about 1000€/month plus 1500€ installation.
Ouch! Where do you live?
I live about 20km from Kuopio. I have 20/2Mbps fiber with IP TV for euro55 per month, and 100/10Mbps is available for euro75 per month. No throttling or caps have been observed - there's a shared 10Gbps switch. Installation was a couple of hundred euro or thereabouts (I don't recall the price exactly).
Interestingly, this fiber net+TV service was introduced by KPY, but since they were acquired by DNA, information on it has been progressively removed from the web, and I suspect plans for extending it have been scaled back.
http://www.digitoday.fi/pdf/newsPdf.php?news_id=20078701
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I think, from memory, that mobile operators HAVE to (by law) allow 999 emergency calls through (network bandwidth notwithstanding) free of charge - try it on a PAYG phone without credit - it still works.
The reason they cannot guarantee emergency call access is probably more to do with being able (or not) to get a signal in the first place.
Let's instead work to force ISPs to be honest. If you say I have 6mbps (or whatever) of bandwidth and a 24/7 connection to the Internet, then I should be able to use that 6mbps * 24 * 7. The fact that this may cause Comcast's network some add'l work or problems is not the customer's concern.
And it won't be your ISP's problem when your $30 internet goes to $300 a month because your ISP had to buy a huge chunk of upstream capacity, will it?
I'll spell it out for you:
ISP's oversubscribe their upstream links.
That's how they can make a living.
You can buy a T1 for yourself if you like and cut out the eeeevil money-grabbing ISP. Oh look, they seem to start at about $600/mo. There's your bandwidth right there, all you can eat. Help yourself, but don't forget to pay the bill.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
ISPs get their bandwidth from PEERING AGREEMENTS, if you don't know what that is, I'll spell it out for you:
THEY THROW A FIBRE FROM EACH BIG ISP TO A BIG SWITCH AND EXCHANGE TRAFFIC FREELY
That is correct: they buy nothing and sell you internet. What you're paying is operational costs, NOT product. A T1 line has nothing to do with this because the bonus you pay is for GOOD support and guaranteed service.
Wow you have three posts since you registered that account and all three are ads for "onlinebackupvault.com"
How about not spamming?
8 * 1.36 > 130?
A nice example of why "No Child Left Behind" is a joke.
Trolling is a art,
Actually between DirecTV's VOD service (which uses the Internet to stream video to the DVR) and just a little bit of torrenting I could conceivably hit 250GB. The same for people who use NetFlix streaming.
I am a former Speakeasy customer as well. It's true, they changed after being bought by bestbuy. The technical support was just as good I have to say, and the speeds were still good and reliable. The change came in billing. We consistently paid the bills about 10 or 15 days after they were due, which with a business account, is a fairly standard practice. A great deal of businesses hold their accounts almost 40 days past due as an accounting strategy. We had been reliably paying speakeasy in this way for about 6 years. After Best Buy bought them, the abusive emails and calls from their credit department started. Not that we had asked for any sort of credit. We were repeatedly threatened with being cut off, told we were "stealing" from them (despite the fact that we paid them reliably) and when we presented them with evidence that we had been reliably paying them for 6 years, were called liars, to our faces by one "Cruz Rojas", who as far as I know, still works there. In May of this year, something worse happened. We had been paying speakeasy on a payment plan with a debit card number attached to a DDA (direct deposit account, like checking, but without the use of checks because we never write checks anyway). So one day we come into the office and our power is out, the food in the fridge is rotting, the machines are down, etc. Speakeasy, and Cruz Rojas in particular (yes I am singling you out you fucking scum bag!) Had charged our DDA for ~$450 without our permission and this caused an accounting nightmare as suddenly our other automatic payments to other utilities (such as..ya know...POWER!!) bounced. What they didn't know apparently, is that accessing a DDA without explicit permission on a case by case basis, is a violation of federal law. (I can cite the particular statute if requested) So we decided to tell speakeasy's credit department this, to see if they'd, ya know, back off and realize they had screwed up. We were quoted company policy repeatedly basically telling us we were screwed and there was nothing they were going to do. Guess what, I used to work at best buy a long time ago in a reality far far away, and I remember a manager at the tech bench bullshitting a customer with the exact same shpiel. We are on a new ISP now (thank god) and its cheaper and has better speeds (Lightning Bolt DSL). It's really tragic that an ISP as awesome as speakeasy was ruined by Best Buy. Jump ship while you can!
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
In my area, Speakeasy had always just been a reseller of Covad's services. So, I went with Covad instead and cut out the middle-man.
Strictly speaking, Speakeasy resells Covad's DSL provisioning (i.e. running the DSLAM's). Speakeasy provides the actual internet connectivity, DNS and NTP services. I'm not sure who is responsible for the connection between the DSLAM and Speakeasy's nodes.
I could also be said that Covad is in the business of reselling the ILEC's local loop from the CO to the customer.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
VOIP providers provide e911 numbers to their subscribers. The users have to provide their service address, and the provisioning systems will map an e911 number to the VOIP service for that service address. However, since you can take your VOIP router with you where-ever you go, it is important to update your VOIP service provider when you move (if you are billed automatically by credit card, people can overlook doing this). MOST IMPORTANTLY, you need to VERIFY the e911 number is updated too! Some tragic events have happened because this was neglected, overlooked, or not even realized by the subscribers. In Canada, this resulted in the death of a little boy earlier this year or late last year. An ambulance was dispatched to an old address... the original service address for the account. Meanwhile the family had moved halfway across the country.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.