Exploring My Families Broadband Usage

In an idle moment I checked our families monthly broadband statistics and I was quite surprised by the numbers.

The last time I actively perused these figure was perhaps eight years ago when we had a 30Gb monthly allowance and I remember that our usage rarely ever exceeded 10Gb per month. Internet speeds have increased a lot since then, the web has become more data rich, game downloads have become bigger, my teenage kids have developed insatiable appetites for online connectivity and of course Netflix has happened. Taking all of this into account I think that I would have expected a ten fold increase in internet usage - perhaps 100Gb typical usage per month.

Here are the numbers for the last few months:

Broadband Usage History

Billing period	Downloaded	Uploaded	Total
07 Dec - 06 Jan	336.66 GB	69.10 GB	405.76 GB
07 Nov - 06 Dec	218.61 GB	75.39 GB	294.00 GB
07 Oct - 06 Nov	154.22 GB	76.86 GB	231.08 GB
07 Sep - 06 Oct	182.66 GB	493.38 GB	676.04 GB
07 Aug - 06 Sep	196.54 GB	196.62 GB	393.16 GB

Wow. I didn't expect the numbers to be that high. A monthly average usage of 400Gb peaking to 676Gb last September.

The large upload numbers are surprising but I can explain them. My wife is a very keen photographer and in August we started to use cloud storage. The high uploads for August and September were the initial uploads of the archive and the ongoing monthly uploads are mainly new photos.

Our normal monthly downloads are 150Gb to 200Gb but it looks like we watched a lot of extra movies on Netflix during the Christmas Holidays (plus I may have bought a few big games).

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