Half of Fixed Broadband Users Consume Less than 2 Gbytes Per Month

A new study by the Federal Communications Commission confirms that "heavy users" are a distinct minority of users, and that half of all users consume less than two gigabytes a month. A small percentage of all users consumer very-large amounts of data, sometimes as much as a terabyte, the report says.

The most data-intensive one percent of residential consumers appear to account for roughly 25 percent of all traffic. The top three percent of users consume 40 percent of all bandwidth.

The top 10 percent of users consume 70 percent of all fixed broadband data, and the top 20 percent of users consume 80 percent of all data.

While half of all users consume less than 2 GByes per month, the last six percent of users consume more than 15 GBytes each month.

The average Internet user has been online for 10 years and spends roughly 29 hours per month online at home, double the amount in 2000.

Overall, per-person usage is growing about 30 percent to 35 percent per year.

There are four distinct use profiles among U.S. consumers, each with different usage
characteristics, the report suggests.

For these four use profiles, actual download speed demands range from 0.5 to 7 megabits per second. The report says 80 percent of broadband use today is by users in three profiles, and that those customers require actual download speeds of no more than 4 Mbps.

The FCC analysis shows that average (mean) actual speed consumers received was approximately 4 Mbps, while the median actual speed was roughly 3 Mbps in 2009 (half the connections ran faster, half ran slower).

FCC report here