“Power users,” defined as accounts using far more data than the typical home broadband user, are not necessarily what you might think. Though we might traditionally have thought of such power users as major content creators or users with extraordinary downloading behavior, that arguably is no longer the case.
The phrase “yesterday’s power user is today’s typical user” is apt. Where perhaps 11 percent of home broadband users in the third quarter of 2022 were power users, consuming at least a terabyte of data each month, the typical or average account used perhaps 496 gigabytes, with a median consumption of perhaps 324 gigabytes,
According to Openvault, about 16 percent of accounts in the third quarter of 2022 were “power users” consuming at least a terabyte of data per month. Perhaps we once thought of power users as people with much higher than average computing skills, perhaps including software code writers, very-active content creators and sharers or online gaming enthusiasts.
These days, the popularity of video streaming adds a more mundane class of users: people who watch lots of entertainment video. Perhaps a working definition is a person or household that streams at least eight hours of video each day. Do that and it is easy to top a terabyte of usage in a month.
It should then come as no surprise that Openvault data shows a continued increase in gigabit service plan adoption, as well as migration of subscribers to speeds of 200 Mbps or higher. Though there is no linear casual relationship between access speeds and total data consumption, the two phenomena are correlated.
Faster speeds allow more to be done in any X amount of time, so more data can be consumed in X amount of time, for example. Over time, applications also are designed to take advantage of higher bandwidths (speed), such as embedding autoplay full-motion video into apps. That increases “involuntary” data consumption.
Some 15 percent of U.S. households purchased gigabit tier plans in the third quarter of 2022, an increase of 35 percent over the 11.4 percent market share 12 months prior, says Openvault.
As always, typical speeds also increased for typical accounts. The percentage of accounts buying service in the 200 Mbps to 400 Mbps range doubled to 54.8 percent from 27.4 percent over the last year.
At the end of the third quarter, only 4.7 percent of all subscribers were provisioned for speeds of less than 50 Mbps, a reduction of more than half from the third quarter 2021 figure of 9.8 percent. .
Average monthly usage of 495.5 GB was up 13.9 percent from 3Q21’s average of 434.9 GB, and represented a slight increase over 2Q22’s 490.7 GB. Median broadband was up 14.3 percent year over year, representing broader growth across all subscribers.
Year-over-year growth of power users of 1TB or more was 18 percent, to 13.7 percent of all subscribers, while the super power user category of consumers of 2 TB or more rose almost 50 percent during the same time frame.
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