As noted by RapidTV News (https://tinyurl.com/y5hecedu), driven in part by the rise in Internet-only subscribers and an increasing number of “power users,” cord-cutting drove a spike in overall broadband usage in the first quarter of 2019 according to the latest OpenVault Broadband Industry (OVBI) report.
The quarterly report reflecting broadband usage based on the aggregate consumption of millions of subscribers, found that that overall average monthly usage reached a new high of 273.5 GBytes in the first quarter of 2019. This represents a year-over-year increase of 27% over the first quarter of 2018 monthly amount.
It also found that as more subscribers opt out of traditional pay-TV packages, presumably said OpenVault in favour of over-the-top streaming, the impact on bandwidth consumption is notable. For Internet-only households, average bandwidth consumption is 395.7 GBytes, compared to 273.5 GBytes for an average household. Households that purchase a bundle of video and internet service were found to consume 209.5 GBytes per month, slightly more than half the data consumption of internet-only households.
“Terabyte power users” were more pronounced in Internet-only households, accounting for 6.5% of those households, compared with only 2.2% of bundled households. Median usage also showed a broad gap, with Internet-only households consuming 294.5 GBytes monthly, compared with 93.8 GBytes for video-bundled households.
In total, Internet-only subscribers consumed 395.7 GBytes, more than 120 GBytes more than the average subscriber and almost double the 209.5 GBytes consumed by households that purchase a bundle of video and Internet services.
The also showed vast differences between operators who employed flat-rate billing and those who used usage-based billing. In flat-rate billing systems, the percentage of power users is 32% greater than in usage-based billing systems, and the percentage of subscribers using more than 2 TB is 76% greater.
