Report: Avg Home Consumes 190GB/month of Data

The average monthly bandwidth consumption is roughly 190 gigabytes and rising, according to a new study by research firm iGR. According to the full paywalled report, more than 95% of the data being consumed is video. This surge in video consumption and overall data usage is a driving factor behind the growing number of ISPs that have chosen to more heavily cap usage and charge consumers overage fees.

iGR President Iain Gillott tells Telecompetitor that data usage spiked significantly once television became an individual activity via smartphones and tablets. Overall hours of television being watched remains static, but with each household member now watching different (or sometimes the same) content individually, usage has soared.“TV has become a personal activity,” said Gillot. “If you have four people in a household now, that means four times the data going in.”

And Gillott was quick to note that as 4K and HDR content becomes the streaming norm, that usage will only obviously skyrocket.

“What drives usage is more high-definition,” he notes. “It doubles the amount of data used,” adding that “you only need a few people like my son and ‘Hello 500 gigs in a month.'”

Some ISP usage caps have scaled with this growth in consumption, while some haven’t. Both AT&T and Comcast for example recently bumped their usage caps to one terabyte per month (unless you’re on AT&T DSL, which remains capped at 150 GB), fearing the FCC was going to begin cracking down on the practice. But countless other ISPs continue to enforce caps that will quickly be obliterated once 4K streaming becomes the norm.