MetaChat - Do you know how much bandwidth your household uses in a month?

MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.

13 March 2012

Do you know how much bandwidth your household uses in a month? →[More:]

I only have two options here for high speed internet: slow (1Mbps) with unlimited bandwidth, or fast (22Mbps) with limited (22GB) bandwidth.

We've been on the slow-but-unlimited company for a long time, but some changes with the competition (raised bandwidth limits) and with our household (hello step-teenager) made the slow connection frustrating: streaming video always seemed to get priority through our router, so starting a YouTube video made everything else slow to a crawl.

Five days ago we switched to the fast-but-limited company and WOW the speeds are fantastic. I can load a video AND upload images WHILE the boy is watching Netflix in the living room. It's amazing.

But I just checked our data usage: 53Gb. In 5 days. On a 200GB plan. Which means we're going to go over before our first month is up, and there's no larger plan to pay for.

We watch Netflix and hour or two a night, the teen watches more on the weekend. The teen plays Minecraft, the husband plays some flash games and codes websites, and I upload photos and stream Pandora once in a while. Netflix is the only thing I can imagine making our usage so high.

An acquaintance who works at the telecom company claims that there is NO WAY a household would EVER use more than 40GB a month without EXCESSIVE use, probably TORRENTS and I'm just frustrated that I have no other options.

Is this usage excessive for a family of 3?
How much internet do you use?

post by: rhapsodie at: 00:21 | 19 comments

Generally 30 to 50 GB. Highest month last year was 79 GB.

posted by arse_hat 13 March | 00:40

I would think that 10 GB a day you would have to be pulling down 3 or more blu ray movies a day. That's a lot of data.

posted by arse_hat 13 March | 00:48

I suspect HD video makes a significant difference. I would cut that out first.

posted by tortillathehun 13 March | 01:05

I don't know much about Netflix, but I got curious and came across this, which might be useful in figuring out whether that's where your data is going (up to 2.3 GB per hour for HD content). This considers the issue of inflated claims from ISPs about how much traffic Netflix uses.

We only use about 15GB per month, but don't do any video streaming or downloading except the occasional Youtube blowout.

posted by dg 13 March | 01:24

I was routinely going over 10 GB a month (but less than 20 GB) as someone who works out of their home office and is online all the time. I was limiting my streaming video usage (hulu, youtube) to make up for the fact that I was using video/audio chat daily.

Are you doubly-sure you aren’t misreading MB for GB in the stats? I could only see using 10 GB a day if streaming HD video and doing a lot of downloading/torrenting.

(And as a total aside, I’m surprised at your report of lack of options in your area. I thought GCI had several plans between the two options you mention.)

posted by D.C. 13 March | 10:06

Yes. About 12-15GB, which means I've had to increase my bandwidth through my ISP for a small extra payment per month, as I kept going over the 10GB allowance.

I could get Sky broadband with unlimited bandwidth for less than I'm paying now, but, to be honest, my ISP is great - it's a dedicated ISP and hosting company that doesn't mess about with any other services, so the ones it does offer it does very well. To get Sky I'd need to change phone providers and I've heard all kinds of horror stories about people having no broadband and phone for months due to glitches by both Sky and BT in managing the changeover. As I work from home 3 days a week, I'm of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" school of thought, because I can't have any broadband downtime.

posted by Senyar 13 March | 10:32

I *think* I remember hearing that netflix does a bandwidth test (so to speak) and delivers a higher quality (and so, more massive, data-wise) version if the connection can support it. So...if that's right, upgrading your speed would increase the amount of data you pull down per movie.

And yeah, an hour-long TV show, in high def, can be over 1GB if you downloaded it as a torrent, so...high quality video from netflix could easily account for those numbers, I think.

posted by richat 13 March | 10:53

Yes, from this article, it sounds like "best" does amount to 1GB/hr. So, perhaps it'd be wise to lower that?

P.S. In answer to the original question...no, I don't know, but I've got okay speed and unlimited bandwidth, so...it's all working out okay for me :-)

posted by richat 13 March | 11:03

I'm not misreading our usage, we've used 25% of our bandwidth already. I remember last time we tried this company when the usage limit was much lower (40GB) and we didn't have the teen, we blew through that in 22 days. So I thought the 200gb plan would be more than enough.

Even if HD Netflix is 1GB/hr, we haven't watched that much television. Besides lowering the quality of Netflix (great idea! I just did that!) how can I determine where all of this usage is coming from? We have a lot of devices on the network:

2 desktops (mine and the mister's)
2 laptops (the teen's and the mister's work laptop, he codes from home)
2 iPhones (mine and the mister's)
1 iPod (the teen's)
1 iPad (mine, rarely uses home wifi)
1 Nook (mine, only connects for software updates)

posted by rhapsodie 13 March | 12:45

Just double-checking, though I'm 99.9% sure you guys wouldn't do such a silly thing, but you DON'T have an unsecured wireless network, right?

I'd guess that none of the IOS devices are using much, again, unless they are ALSO streaming high-def video.

Other than torrents (could the teen be downloading stuff as well as streaming?) I can't think of anything that could be chewing up that much data. I've never really played with any tools to monitor bandwidth usage, either, I'm afraid.

posted by richat 13 March | 13:47

Our highest usage was 120GB in a month. That was watching 3-4 hours of HD Netflix most days (including Christmas vacation) and a few days of high-bandwidth downloads & uploads for work. 53Gb in 5 days is excessive. My bet is that your teen is downloading torrents on the quiet, now that the bandwidth allows them to. This could be happening in the background on another PC, while they appear to be doing something else.
richat's question is a good one. If your wireless is secured, could anyone else have the wireless router passcode?

posted by Susurration 13 March | 14:09

The router is secured and we can account for every device connected to it. Teen (he's 13) doesn't know what torrents are (we asked) and I've verified he isn't running a Minecraft server on his machine (was my first thought). He did admit to downloading one podcast's full history - but that only explains one day's high bandwidth, not the other 4.

One other device I forgot is connected is the PlayStation. Is that constantly downloading updates for all games? Or only when we put in a disc?

posted by rhapsodie 13 March | 15:50

Dang, our bill doesn't tell us how much bandwidth we're using. But in asking the mister about that, his only suggestions to check out have already been covered by people up-thread, so no help from me.

posted by deborah 13 March | 20:26

Oh and the Netflix is streaming through a Roku.

Damn we have a ton of devices.

posted by rhapsodie 13 March | 20:55

I wonder how much we use at home. I've asked the boyfriend to investigate.

I do know that I used about 28G last month on my cell phone. I've got the Sprint unlimited data plan, so I pretty much watch Netflix all day at work.

posted by youngergirl44 14 March | 12:31

Last night we used 1.5GB, but the house was mostly empty all day and that usage was two hours of (low quality) Netflix and four or five person-hours of Internet browsing (and DrawSomething - holy hell that's addicting).

So I'm thinking someone isn't fessing up to something.

posted by rhapsodie 14 March | 13:12

And that someone is most likely the teen.

"I only played Team Fortress for a little bit. And downloads a few podcasts."
"How long do you play?"
"A couple hours."
"Three? Seven? Ten?"
"Just a few."
"How long is this video you're currently watching?"
"I only have 6 more minutes."
"How long is the video?"
"I dunno? 20 minutes?"
"And I've heard you watching this guy before. Minecraft videos? How often do you watch them?"
"Once in a while?"
"Every day?"
"Sometimes?"
"That's a yes or no question."
"Yes."
"Is this what you downloaded or is it on YouTube?"
"YouTube."
"So how often do you watch this?"
"I dunno. a couple a day?"
"A day?"
"Yeah?"
"A couple as in 2? 3?"
"8?"
"So you're watching 160 minutes of video a day on Youtube. Minimum."
"Yeah. Would that cause bandwidth issues?"
"Donovan. Jesus."

The mister told him he was getting a detailed report on every computer's traffic. You'd think he told him we caught him beating off.

posted by rhapsodie 14 March | 20:16

Heh, beating off doesn't take up near that much bandwidth. The video quality is too crappy.

posted by Ardiril 14 March | 20:30

I'm leaving that conversation to his dad anyway.

posted by rhapsodie 14 March | 21:53

← Woman who invented Spanx now a billionaire || Sir, You Are Being Hunted →

HOME || REGISTER || LOGIN