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Broadband-Only Customers Use Twice the Data of Bundle Subscribers

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Households that subscribe to broadband internet only use almost twice the data of households that subscribe to bundled broadband and video services. That information comes from OpenVault, a company that provides broadband industry analytics.

News 1Internet-only customers, who are more likely to stream all or most of their video entertainment, average 395.7 GB of data per month. The average customer users 120 GB less than that, while the average bundle household uses 209.5 GB.

Some users go far beyond those numbers, and are dubbed "power users" by OpenVault. The number of power users—who use over 1 TB or more of data each month—is growing: In Q1 2018, 2.1% of all broadband customers were power users; in Q1 2019, that grew to 4.2%. A small percentage of homes are super power users, as 0.38% use over 2 TB per month.

Internet-only customers are far more likely to be power users, as 6.5% of all internet-only households use over 1 TB of data per month, compared to 2.2% of bundle subscribers.

To profit from this spike in demand, OpenVault advocates broadband providers switch to usage-based billing, as opposed to flat rates.

“As more and more households opt out of service providers’ service bundles, operators are facing significantly increased demand for broadband capacity,” says Josh Barstow, executive vice president of corporate strategy and business development for OpenVault. “It’s in the best interest of the industry to use existing tools to ensure that subscribers are provisioned for the appropriate levels of service, and to consider usage-based billing as a bandwidth-management tool.”

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