How we use the internet

The FCC has released new data about American consumer internet use.

The Technical Paper [2.82 MB, pdf] “analyzes residential consumer usage of broadband and the performance of fixed broadband connections in the U.S.”

This paper is organized into three sections: the first looks at how residential consumers use their internet access service and classifies consumers into four user profiles; the second looks at the performance of U.S. consumers’ broadband connections; and, the third explains how the data led to the FCC’s National Broadband Plan target of 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps up.

Although the data is from the U.S., there are many points that are likely highly portable to Canada. Much has been made of download caps from the internet service providers. The FCC found that that the median user consumed 1.7 GB/month, while the average (mean) U.S. Internet user consumed 9.2 GB/month. The extreme between the mean and median was explained by the FCC as principally due to a relatively small number of users who consume very large amounts of data each month – sometimes as high as terabytes per month.

The most data-intensive 1% of residential consumers appear to account for roughly 25% of all traffic, the top 3% consume 40%, the top 10% consume 70%, and the top 20% of users consume 80% of all data. While half of all users consume less than 2 GB per month, the last 6% of users consume more than 15 GB each month.

These results are from a country that already has streaming TV services like Hulu and Netflix.

Important quantitative data that can hopefully contribute to the dialog on broadband services evolution on both sides of the border.