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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.)"
I don't get my connectivity through a major provider. I get dsl through sonic.net. They are a AT&T reseller, but with huge advantages. They have not once ever mentioned bandwidth limits. I have static IPs, and I am allowed to run servers (mail, web, etc). Of course, I pay more than the average joe-user. About $70/month, but I feel it's worth it.
I've never measured my usage, but your question has me curious. I'll install a meter and get back to you in a month. LOL
-- Will program for bandwidth
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!".
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
Pretty much every Aussie ISP will break it down into days used, and some will even be able to tell you what ports you thrashed.
I have this nice little program in my system tray that shows me how much I have used in my "month", how many days remaining, how much I have been using per day and how much I have remaining per day.
But back to the OP, about 65-75GB a month between 2 people.
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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.
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.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The whole family uses the internet connection spread over 4 computers. We watch Youtube video's and for work I use the net a lot. Yet an average month uses up about 7 GB.
I just cannot imagine how a 250GB cap is a limitation in anyway unless you are a major torrent host.
I get a fully unshaped 8Mbit connection with 15GB transfer per month for £20.
Anything downloaded between midnight and 8am is not counted towards the cap
One of the tech gurus at my ISP wrote a fine blog article about how UK ISPs are charged for their transfer. It's a completely different market economic to the US, which is why we've had transfer limits for some time.
Beer Coat: The invisible but warm coat worn when walking home after a booze cruise at 3 in the morning.
900 gigabyte per month upload should be enough for everybody. But in reality. Some weeks I go over 5-10Gigabyte per week (Netherlands) just doing VPN kind of stuff. Other weeks I don't even hit 100megabyte. I would want to be able to send my parents the footage from my harddisk camcorder without any encoding etc, but the upload still sucks.
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I am so sick of these whiney posts.... wah wah wah, I might be capped soon.
I've been capped since around 2002.
I live in Australia, I'm capped to 80gb, I download around that each month (which is a lot), and I have 4.5mbit down and 1mbit up.
I also pay $109 for this privilege (although that's on top of $15 per month line fees).
Don't worry about your usage, 250gb is heaps, you will normalize once you're capped, I guarantee it!
Also if you find that your cap is too small, upgrade, change your ISP, or come up with strategies to maximize your cap.
For instance my ISP (http://www.adam.com.au) has separate caps for traffic inside of Australian than it does for outside of Australia. Additionally it also has CommunityNet on its exchanges which basically turns that exchange into a private LAN. Another method is to find people near you and setup your own LAN or sharing network.
There are many ways to maximize your potential.
This is not the end of the world.
You've still got it way better than us and a lot of the rest of the world.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
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?
We have four people sharing our network, although only two of us really use the net for much more than surfing. Even with 15GB this is the first month since we got this plan where it looks like we wont be going over the limit (our month ends on the 18th). Would move to ADSL2+ which I can get with my ISP for the exact same price as I pay now and with 20GB of data, but because the company that provides the ADSL have really shitty prices compared to the company who my ISP gets its ADSL2+ off in order to switch to ADSL2+ I would have to downgrade to 56K and then upgrade to ADSL2+ which is apparently a nightmare and could leave me without internet for up to 3 weeks, which is something I cant live with. Understandably I'm annoyed, but there isn't much I can do until my ISP implements a simple changeover (which has been 'just around the corner' for years apparently). I'm in Australia BTW.
Right. But it's long-since been accepted as synonymous with 'quantity of data transferred', even if it's technically incorrect.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
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. ... positive (pdf).
That's because my ISP has heavily invested in its infrastructure, and the results are
If US ISPs spent half as much on lawyers and lobbyists, maybe they could afford bigger series of pipes.
No I honestly don't think so (re collusion/corruption). Australia is one of the least corrupt countries in the world (very little corporate-government interaction or influence compared to most other places, although Scandinavia and NZ have us beat on that front).
The caps are there simply because of the peering/transit costs mentioned, as well as the fact that the last mile copper phone lines are owned by ex-government monopoly telco Telstra (think AT&T, but worse), which charges other ISPs a fair bit to use 'their' lines.
There have been ISPs offering true unlimited here. They all went bankrupt within 18 months. It just can't be done here on a sustainable and economic basis. The US is a different kettle of fish though and I do agree with you that caps aren't necessary there.
Other than the 'Telstra issue' though, ISP competition here seems to be working well and is leading to constantly increasing caps. Average caps for home connections have gone from 5 GB to 100s of GB in just a few years.
Keep in mind my 25 GB quota is small! Most of my friends have 100+ GB quotas, and they are affordable. I just chose 'faster' over 'more data'.
But yeah, I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you. The US market needs more competition and can support unlimited internet. I was simply drawing the distinction between the two places, and saying that life with a cap isn't bad at all. But I'm not saying you shouldn't fight against them in the US.
My ISP officially offers unlimited bandwith on this 20/1Mb connection.
ATM data rate Kbit/s down 16910 up 1011
Below the stats of my Fritz!box modem, please note I'm often away for weeks.
Last month included some Linux iso's and usenet binaries.
Use might get as high as 500MB.
Online Time Data Volume Connections
Period [hh:mm] total sent/received Number
Today 11:20 5054 MB 107 MB/4947 MB 1
Yesterday 24:00 8748 MB 178 MB/8570 MB 1
Current week 11:20 5054 MB 107 MB/4947 MB 1
Current month 11:20 5054 MB 107 MB/4947 MB 1
Last month 742:08 118319 MB 2832 MB/115487 MB 36
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Have you considered running a Tor node instead ?
I've already set up nodes several times in the past, but neither Tor, nor Freenet are currently worth the legal risks for me. Where I live, someone has been in prison for the past 3 months because he showed animal rights' activists how to encrypt their PCs... Therefore I'd rather wait for out-of-the-box support in mainstream browsers so I don't need to explain why I am using Tor or Freenet (I'll just tell them it's built into my browser like SSL).
Yeah, I'm paranoid, but wouldn't you be when people in your neighbourhood get thrown in jail because they've encrypted their e-mails and hard disk?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Does it really matter if you ISP is worse? Comcast is doing this for control.
Comcast makes most of its money from cable TV. They do not want people watching TV or buying movies and downloading them over the Internet. That cuts into Comcast's main profit center. It's no different than the RIAA trying to force customers to buy CDs.
Comcast does not want you using the full bandwidth of your pipe 24/7 -- no matter what you're doing.
If Comcast can weaken the 'Net Neutrality concept -- and a bandwidth cap is a first step in that direction -- then Comcast gains more control. Comcast knows that they can turn that control into additional revenue at some time.
Your argument seems to be a "race to the bottom" one. i.e., "My ISP in another country is worse so what are you griping about."
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.
Although I'm running a small server with just my web site and SSH access, an increasing proportion of my bandwidth is taken up (read "wasted") by the scumbags trying to hack into my machine. This is obviously worse in the summer when all the script kiddies decide to play hacker and now that the little bastards are back to school my ISP should stop sending me those warning notices. The problem is that even if I block them at my router firewall they still use bandwidth and complaining to Russian and Chinese ISPs gets you absolutely nowhere.
I got an xbox360 for my birthday earlier this year. When I heard the new dashboard update would allow netflix streaming, I had to get a netflix account.
I watch a lot of Internet TV. I play a lot of games. I download a lot of porn. I surf a lot of web.
My ISP, comcast has said, I can only download 8GB a day. If I'm watching a marathon of TV from netflix instant, I will blow through that in about 12 hours.
Tack on the fact that I download demos from xbox live that are usually 1-1.5GB apiece. I play PC games regularly. I am also a steam user who buys a new game at least once a month. I download Linux isos also, though not regularly. I can see how I easily use up that much bandwidth a day.
Comcast is gonna get sued. There's gonna be a class-action. Since they are the only provider in my area that provides the speeds they do for residential services, there is no alternative. Comcast oversold their network capacity. I'm doing nothing wrong. I'm using the Internet access that I signed up for and paid for. Comcast knows they need to expand network capacity but are unwilling to do so. They take a hit in cost and can't charge any more for more network capacity. They'd just oversell it again. Considering that comcast charges a universal service fund fee since they provide Internet access and local telephone service, the USF should provide them with ample monies to enlarge their member's capacity.
When netflix institutes HD streaming, I won't be able to take advantage of it because comcast wont provide me the bandwidth or througput to do so. My ISP will effectively prevent me from enjoying the services I pay for throughout the web.
Comcast thinks that I'm a heavy Internet user. They gambled on grandmas signing up for cable modems and then using them 2 or 3 times a week. They lost and now they're welching.
That being said, they're even charging illegal modem rental fees to me and countless others. Check your original documents from your comcast installation. There's a document titled, "Terms and Conditions for Sale of Cable Modem". I have that document, meaning they sold me a cable modem, not rented me one. Now they're charging fees illegally. They're really gonna get sued. I'm not the fat guy at the buffet. I'm the skinny guy who eats a normal amount. They are the ones trying to save their money by limiting the amount of trips to the buffet you can make. They say I'm eating too much. Well, now even in India, they're eating as much as me. In Japan, they're eating three times as much as me and they pay half of what I do.
They're using their grammar skills there.
All the talk of caps has got me wondering how much those friendly little streaming video commercials eat up? The problem is if you do a lot of surfing they can be near constant. I often leave CNN open on a browser and it constantly does updates but most of them are to update the video commercials not content. Where as I doubt they take up the majority of my web surfing and usage I can easily see them pushing me over the top. In effect their commercial which I stubbornly refuse to watch can help drive me over the limit and either threaten my service or force me to get a more expensive service with a higher cap. I'll guarantee you that if I ever get a warning the first thing I'll do is stop surfing those sites. I really would like to know just how much of my bandwidth is being eaten up by advertising?