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Your average data use for home internet?

eyoungren

eyoungren

macrumors Nehalem
Original poster
Aug 31, 2011
30,195
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My wife and I recently decided to cut out about $184 from our cable bill. That was solely for television. This was around the end of February 2023. We'd already had a couple of streaming services by this point and primarily TV is used in our home for 'background noise'.

As long as I can get my local TV news and my wife can still get her YT subs and the periodic classic movie it seems we're good. I bought two Amazon Firesticks (we don't have smart TVs). The one downstairs where I work from home has an Ethernet adapter, but the upstairs Firestick operates solely off WiFi (more overhead though). That tends to work out as the TV upstairs is really only used a couple hours a night or on the weekends.

But, I still maintain my habits downstairs and the TV is on from around 3:45am to about 8pm at night. Either streaming my local news and news from Los Angeles (KCAL) or using the Pluto TV app. That's all while I am connected to my work VPN and opening and saving large files over the internet.

I pay my ISP an additional $50 a month for unlimited data. My highpoint before cutting the TV portion of the bill has around 1.2TB of data. That was working from home at the busiest time of year for us.

Tomorrow is the last day of the billing period for my ISP and I expect to hit 1.5TB of data usage, primarily because we are now streaming. I seem to be averaging about 50GB of data a day, although a couple days were much more until I got that ethernet adapter for the downstairs Firestick.

Just wanting to know roughly how much everyone else (who streams TV) uses a month so I can compare. I'm keeping my unlimited data but I'm curious to see if I am average or not in my streaming usage.
 
15+ year ago I dropped Comcast paid TV service and installed a whole home OTA antenna in my attic and a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun so I can stream local TV to any mobile device, computer, and Apple TV. I conservatively estimate I have saved $20K in those 15+ years.

I dropped Comcast HSI once ATT fiber was available in my neighborhood. I pay $30/mo for 300 mbps symmetric (actual speeds are 375) for 1TB per month, which is more than adequate for my low head count household.
 
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elvisimprsntr said:
15+ year ago I dropped Comcast paid TV service and installed a whole home OTA antenna in my attic and a Silicon Dust HDHomeRun so I can stream local TV to any mobile device, computer, and Apple TV. I conservatively estimate I have saved $20K in those 15+ years.

I dropped Comcast HSI once ATT fiber was available in my neighborhood. I pay $30/mo for 300 mbps symmetric (actual speeds are 375) for 1TB per month, which is more than adequate for my low head count household.
Click to expand...
I grew up without cable. AFAIK, the giant antenna my dad and I installed in 1984 is still on top of that house.

However, now that I live in a HOA, I have limits. Quite frankly though, with the easy ability to stream the stuff I was consuming on cable I am not interested in setting up an antenna anyway. Primarily my use for home internet is for web browsing, with work and streaming both being secondary uses. Even before this job I had unlimited data simply because I wanted it. Now it's useful.

I have a Gigabit plan with my provider. That's $100 (roughly) plus the $50 additional for UD.
 
we have 2 ATVs for streaming, wife works from home full-time and I work from home 2 days per week, looks that in Jan our data usage was ~ 1.3TB, less than 1TB in Feb. on a Xfinity 800Mbps plan that has a data cap of 100TB...
hope this helps and gives you a datapoint
 
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jz0309 said:
we have 2 ATVs for streaming, wife works from home full-time and I work from home 2 days per week, looks that in Jan our data usage was ~ 1.3TB, less than 1TB in Feb. on a Xfinity 800Mbps plan that has a data cap of 100TB...
hope this helps and gives you a datapoint
Click to expand...
Yes it does, thank you!
 
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Looking at our usage it looks like we are pretty consistently around 1 TB per month. We also don't have cable and mostly stream the shows we watch, plus I work from home (my partner does not). Can I ask where you live? A $50 charge on top of your plan for unlimited data sound like a lot to me. We have (symmetrical) Gigabit internet for $100/month and unlimited data is included. That's in Canada, and $100 Canadian is only worth about $73 US right now.
 
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bodonnell202 said:
Looking at our usage it looks like we are pretty consistently around 1 TB per month. We also don't have cable and mostly stream the shows we watch, plus I work from home (my partner does not). Can I ask where you live? A $50 charge on top of your plan for unlimited data sound like a lot to me. We have (symmetrical) Gigabit internet for $100/month and unlimited data is included. That's in Canada, and $100 Canadian is only worth about $73 US right now.
Click to expand...
Phoenix, Arizona. Cox Communications is my ISP. I don't mind the extra UD charge so much because Cox charges $10 per 50GB overage to a maximum of $100 in overage fees. The cap is 1.25TB. Paying the extra $50 means I'm not constantly hitting overage and potentially having Cox cut me off. I don't have to worry.
 
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My ISP's usage meter is apparently broken at the moment because it says I've only used 2.8 GB so far this month, despite having downloaded an 8 GB file a few days ago. I think I typically use a few hundred GB, but I've used well over 1 TB in the past.
 
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Nermal said:
My ISP's usage meter is apparently broken at the moment because it says I've only used 2.8 GB so far this month, despite having downloaded an 8 GB file a few days ago. I think I typically use a few hundred GB, but I've used well over 1 TB in the past.
Click to expand...
Part of my reason for getting UD a few years back is the fact that I run multiple Carbon Copy Cloner backups from all my Macs to drive images on Dropbox. The initial backups had me blow through the cap, That's long since stabilized, but there's still multi-gig transfers over the weekends.

So there's that, there's the WFH aspect and then there is the streaming. So far, though it seems like I am right around where I should be.
 
I have Comcast, but in an area that doesn't have data caps.

Around 1.1TB-1.4TB, often over the 1.2TB limit if the data cap was enforced.

Data caps suck, and if it wasn't for cable companies' oligopolistic behavior, I don't that data caps would exist.

Here is the chart for the last 6 months:
Xfinity Sucks.png
 
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I wouldn't even know because I never had to pay extra, it has always been unlimited. I have always paid by speed, not amount. Now I am on fiber, 1gb up and down, for about $90 a month in the Western New York area.
 
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I have no loyalty to Cox, but it's the best of the worst here in Phoenix. I would have long ago tried Century Link, but years of working for local companies that use CL showed me that Century Link is down more than it's up.

And between the two, Cox/Century Link, the business practices of Cox in my market are less shady than CL. Which isn't saying much - but satellite is my only other viable option and they don't have gigabit.
 
I am about to get ATT fiber as that has just been recently installed in the surrounding area and I have the appointment to get my line connected. When I get that upgrade it is for $90 per month for the 1000Gb/s, but I currently average 1-1.2TB per month as there is regularly 1-3 devices streaming something and no data cap
 
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For the past three years I have been working at home and we have been mostly streaming TV. Although we still have cable, 95% of our viewing is streaming. Sometimes I stream TV for background noise but my wife streams 12-14 hours a day four or five days a week when she is home all day and about six hours a day otherwise. I don't have as much work-related data as the OP and we average about 800 GB/month. Here in the northeast Xfinity has no data cap (yet) but the highest we hit was 1.3 TB one month when we were downloading a bunch of Xbox games.
 
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My last billing day was yesterday and the total for the month was 1.468TB. So, it looks as if streaming isn't adding that much, considering our normal usage is around 800GB-1.2TB a month (depending on the month).

Thanks to everyone who chimed in - I feel normal now. :D
 
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Sounds about right. If you figure an HD stream runs at about 5-10 Mbps that's just over 3 GB per hour (and about half of that for video calls). Streaming 12 hours a day for a month is about 1.1 TB.

Online gaming is where it runs up quick(er). Otherwise 1.2 TB/month is about as much as most people typically use.
 
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I wfh 60 hours a week, office in the garage. I am on internet all day for work, and either stream vid all day, or alternate with music for a few hours. I average between 1.5 and 1.7 TB per month since beginning of covid.
 
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We spend $70/mo for Gigabit Fios using our own router and mesh WiFi system. Currently averaging about 800GB download per month. I primarily work from home and occasionally have to move large files around, so the synchronous upload speeds are a real life saver.
 
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