Introduction

Everyone talks about how much data is being created. I haven’t heard too many people talk about how much data they consume and what it costs them to get the data.

Recently I thought about this question and decided to see if I could answer some questions on this topic. This analysis focuses on data consumed in a six month period of mid-2018.

Articles like this are interesting because they form a benchmark of something that is rapidly changing over time. It will be very interesting to revisit this topic in 1, 2 and 5 years from now.

Study Method

I used Comcast as my home internet provider. I pay $139.95 per month for the fastest, unlimited bandwidth package they have available. On their website, I can find a report of the total data usage per month. I grabbed that data to complete this analysis of the past 6 months of data usage.

The download speed I buy is quoted as 100 Mbps (megabits per second), but when I’m moving data for work purposes around while on a VPN, I get about 50 Mbps. The value of 50 Mbps equates to 6.25 Megabytes per second. This is what I consider to be my theoretical maximum download speed during working hours because of existing bottlenecks in the system.

When I am not on a VPN and just consuming data at home, I achieve download and upload speeds of (100/20 Mbps), which is what I should be getting. At home, we consume data in many different ways, like most families. We have work-related activities, school projects, streaming media, on-line games, and general internet usage. In our case, some of our data usage is work-related but it isn’t a significant amount.

I guess that it is a good thing that I am not including the data I use as part of my job. If that were the case, I’d really be considered gluttonous. Figure 1 shows some of the ways I consume data (2 computers, a TV, and an Ipad all at one workstation).

How Much Data Do I Consume?

Figure 2 shows a series of metrics for my internet usage over the past six months. It will be interesting for me to see if I have reached a peak usage or not by revisiting this study at some future time.

Figure 2 – Metrics that answer how much data I consume at home.

Here are the Data Consumption Highlights:

• Monthly usage ranges from 560 Gigabtyes to over 1.6 Terabtyes (1639 Gigabtyes);
• The price paid ranges from $0.25 to $0.09 per Gigabtye;
• The consumption rate varies from 772 to 2,331 Megabtyes per hour;
• Total bandwidth usage is about 5-10% of the system capacity;

This analysis makes me wonder if I am buying more bandwidth than is necessary. However, when I think about paying less than a dime per gigabyte of data received, I feel that is a pretty good deal. I feel this way since I remember a time not long ago when I had to pay $20 per month for a 1 Gb data plan on T-mobile. This means that the price of data has gone down about 200X since then. Of course, the more data I use, the less it costs me per Gigabtye because I pay for an unlimited data plan.

Since Comcast has been a very stable and reliable provider, I’ll likely keep this system in place. It will be interesting to see how this technology changes over time, too.

Final Thoughts

I recently got a message about an excessive use of mobile data. The amount used was 39 gigabytes within a month. When I start thinking about all the ways we are consuming data, it is no wonder that companies need people talented in data science! That is good news for guys like me. Also, it will be interesting to revisit this article in a year or two to see how these metrics have changed.