We are just two people in household, and sometimes our friend stays with us.
I do work from home, and I am software engineer. So a lot of software updates, downloading/uploading containers, etc.
Looking at the Xfinity data usage for the last 6 months: the average is 1300GB, with one month we went to 2.2TB.
I do not understand, how people who share rooms/houses, have kids, can stay below 1TB a month. Just a simple math:
- one 4K movie a night (~5GB, usually more) = 150GB (if two people watching 2 different movies that is 300GB). - software updates on your phone. FB app is 300MB, updates every week, so that is more than 1GB of updates of just one app on your phone. It is not an average for the app size, but most of the popular apps are 200MB+ and update every week. So my guess, every phone, in best case scenario uses about 20GB to just update apps. So if 2 people have one phone and a tablet - that is 80GB of just app updates. - laptops, and software update as well. My guess, another 10-20GB easily per laptop. Two people - 40GB. - if you play games, you probably download one or few games a month, which can be 10-100GB in size at this point.
So that is just basics, and we already have about 400GB of usage a month.
Now, if you got sick for a few days, and decided to watch the two seasons of Games of Thrones or something. 20 hours of 4k video will get you additional 100GB.
In our case, my guess, another 500GB are just regular data usage, browsing internet, instagram, video cameras (ring, eufu) uploading videos, iCloud sync, zoom, doing actually work, etc.
So question is, is our data usage is the same insane? Is it hard for you to keep your usage under 1TB?
In case of Xfinity I actually pay additional $30 a month not to worry about the data caps. But my guess other providers might not have this option.
Most of our media is still 1080p and lower, but all three of us stream a few hours a day, often separately. I've got a modern gaming PC and buy a few games a year. Work often has an hour or two of meetings, but that hasn't ever seemed like it takes a lot of bandwidth. Most of my work in the past few years has been on AWS, and uploads are mostly just new builds of the binary pushed into a cloud VM. 3 computers, a tablet, and 2 phones, updating maybe 1-2 times a month ends up being a few 10s of GB.
Then again, we haven't had data limits in the past couple places I've lived either, so I don't track things super closely.
That's what I had to do when I was on Comcast. For my cell phone I set a soft/hard limit based on my plan but I never use more than 110MB/mo so I doubt I will hit it.
I've since moved to a place that has fiber and does not care how much bandwidth I use. Some of their employees brag about being the top data hogs so I know they do keep track of it but they said they have never limited anyone. So I suppose that is how I dealt with it, I moved.