Report: ‘Power Users’ near 25% of all broadband subs
February 25, 2025
The percentage of Power User subscribers consuming 1 TB of data or more per month has more than tripled in the past five years as broadband usage closed in on another data milestone in 2024.
The findings were reported in the latest edition of the OpenVault Broadband Insights (OVBI) report issued by OpenVault, a source of SaaS-based revenue and network improvement solutions and data-driven insights for the broadband industry.
According to the report, the percentage of Power Users rose to almost one-quarter of all subscribers – 24.3 per cent – in 4Q 2024, a 232 per cent increase over the 7.3 per cent reported at the end of the last pre-pandemic report, in 2019. The surge in high-volume users, together with continued growth in the upstream growth rate and consistent incremental downstream increases, boosted average monthly total consumption nearing 700 GB.
The report’s analysis of data collected by OpenVault’s SaaS technology solutions shows how historic correlations between broadband speeds and consumption have continued to yield to a new broadband environment. Using data points from millions of individual subscribers, OpenVault notes a variety of key milestones at the end of 2024, including:
- Record average monthly total consumption of 698.2 GB;
- A continued rise in upstream growth, reaching 14.6 per cent; and
- Consumption by individual Extreme Power Users of as much as 53x more downstream and 123x more upstream than the average subscriber.
“Significant shifts in broadband usage patterns continue to reshape the landscape of network performance and subscriber experience,” the report notes. “While average data consumption reached a new milestone, the rate of upstream data growth outpaced the rate of downstream growth, reflecting broader changes in user behavior. As subscribers upgrade to faster speeds at a slower pace, the focus is moving away from speed improvements and toward maintaining optimal network health, performance, and Quality of Experience (QoE).”
Traditionally a benchmark of broadband activity over the previous year, the Q4 OVBI highlights notable trends, including Christmas Day when video conferencing with friends and family, holiday movie streaming, the playing of new online games, and the addition of new connected devices drives usage to new heights. The Q4 2024 report draws a bead on Christmas Day consumption, the diverging paths of upstream and downstream growth rates, and the impact that the highest-volume subscribers can have on network traffic.
Among the findings:
- Christmas Day usage, consistently high from 9am until 10pm, was 24 per cent higher than on Christmas Day Q4 2022 and 58 per cent higher than in Q4 2020.
- While the 14.6 per cent rate of upstream growth represented continued upward acceleration, downstream growth rate of 8.6 per cent was marginally less than in Q4 2023, continuing a declining rate of increase.
- The subscriber with the highest downstream data usage consumed 34 TB in Q4 2024—53x the average downstream usage of 652.3 GB per subscriber. The top individual upstream usage was 5.5 TB, 123x the average upstream usage of 45.9 GB in Q4 2024.
To address the need for higher performance, the broadband industry is developing and deploying new solutions that can optimise profiles and create more available bandwidth. The Q4 2024 OVBI includes a brief on the deployment of OV Advanced PMA, showing a 27 per cent increase in throughput from 201 Mbps to 255 Mbps. This resulted in sufficient bandwidth to accommodate the high-definition streaming of 10 to 15 Netflix movies.
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