Average household bandwidth usage

Keropi · Post by **Keropi** » Thu Dec 31, 2009 8:46 pm

I was looking up this "World Broadband Rankings By Usage" to find Average Household Bandwidth Usage:

http://techcrunchies.com/world-broadban ... -by-usage/

I don't know if this list is for 2008 or 2009, but why is South Korea's bandwidth usage per household so high?

Is there a bandwidth usage percentile listing out there that'll tell you how far out there your bandwidth usage might be?

zerospace · Post by **zerospace** » Thu Dec 31, 2009 10:56 pm

Some broadband providers may actually provide you with a bandwidth usage graph to assist you in staying below any limitations they might impose. The company I used to work for had something like this available to customers starting shortly before I resigned my position there in 2006.

For a more recent example, Comcast appears to be launching a tool to track your bandwidth if you are a Comcast user:

http://blog.comcast.com/2009/12/comcast ... nches.html

You might also note that in that blog, Comcast claims an average household useage as being in the vicinity of 2 to 4 GB per month. This was definitely true back in my ISP days, but I'd imagine those numbers have increased for a number of people in more recent years, especially with folks downloading large video files. So that would be a pretty large discrepancy between Comcast's "average" and the one in the article you found. Hmmm...

I suppose I'm not surprised.

Keropi · Post by **Keropi** » Fri Jan 01, 2010 12:26 am

Very interesting page there. Thanks for that link! The 250 Gb limit sounds pretty high on my end. Seems like you'd have to leave your computer on downloads for much of the day to be able to use that much. The 2-4 Gb stated "average a month" sounds low to me though.

I've got that Bandwidth Pro program. On my newer computer I've been up for:

Dec 2009 - 51.45 Gb download - 4.61 Gb upload - 56.06 Gb total
Nov 2009 - 49.99 Gb download - 4.74 Gb upload - 54.73 Gb total
Oct 2009 -- 55.86 Gb download - 5.45 Gb upload - 61.32 Gb total
Sep 2009 - 52.68 Gb download - 4.74 Gb upload - 57.42 Gb total
Aug 2009 - 58.54 Gb download - 5.86 Gb upload - 64.40 Gb total

It shouldn't be as high the next three months though because the anime season is going to be a lot smaller.

Those streaming videos use up a lot of bandwidth. Yesterday I watched one and it ate up 100 Mb for 24 minutes of video! It's interesting to see how difficult/easy it is to create numbers too large like that.

yoshito · Post by **yoshito** » Fri Jan 01, 2010 11:08 am

There are a lot of online gamers and online games created in South Korea which adds up. If they play online as much as I used to do when I played WoW I can see those numbers being up there.

Keropi · Post by **Keropi** » Fri Jan 01, 2010 10:55 pm

Hmm...that makes a lot of sense.

Hope the bandwidth restrictions don't hit where I'm at. I don't need another rapidly rising bill like my health insurance bill for next year (mine went up 12.7% in January. Usually it only goes up 5% to 7% per year).

iceman57 · Post by **iceman57** » Sat Jan 02, 2010 1:10 pm

Funny to see France in such ranking compare to USA that are 5 times bigger in population.

I may think that this is due to the massive movie download there from the Canadian DVDs that allows you to see a DVD in your mother language when it comes to cinema six months later in old Europe

yoshito · Post by **yoshito** » Sat Jan 02, 2010 3:59 pm

Keropi wrote:Hmm...that makes a lot of sense.

Hope the bandwidth restrictions don't hit where I'm at. I don't need another rapidly rising bill like my health insurance bill for next year (mine went up 12.7% in January. Usually it only goes up 5% to 7% per year).

It sounds like you don't really abuse your connection too much so I wouldn't see your ISP hitting you with a cost increase. I'm looking more at your upload since that usually is the first flag that they notify users.

Keropi · Post by **Keropi** » Sat Jan 02, 2010 6:39 pm

I'm surprised that Japan isn't higher on the list, but so many factors might be playing into these numbers.

yoshito wrote:It sounds like you don't really abuse your connection too much so I wouldn't see your ISP hitting you with a cost increase. I'm looking more at your upload since that usually is the first flag that they notify users.

That's good to know. I used to upload a lot years ago, but after my hard drive quickly died I didn't feel as motivated to do that anymore. I was giving my HD a quick death. Ah, what a pain it was to replace it.