200 Gb monthly allowance enough?

[peterb]

I happened to stumble on this thread, http://forums.hexus.net/networking-b...-enough-2.html that was started 5 years ago.

At the time, my monthly allowance was what I thought was a whopping 50Gb/month. It was later doubled to 100Gb/month, and has just been doubled again to 200GB/month.

(All download allowance, upload is unlimited)

Again, at the time I was on ADSL, with a download speed of (IIRC) 6 Mb/s, now on FTTC I get 40-50 Mb/s. My monthly download has increased to between 15 and 20 GB month - mainly iPlayer, and more if I download Linux distros or other software open source or paid for).

So in 5 years, I have increased download speed by six times, quadrupled my monthly allowance, and increased my actual download by 4-6 times.

How have others found their usage change over the 5 years?

[KeyboardDemon]

I have BT infinity option 2, this is an unlimited/uncapped package with no FUP restrictions as of April 2011 so 200GB/month seems somewhat restrictive IMHO.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

There are situations where that might be a problem,ie,if you have a lot of gamers.

[peterb]

I have BT infinity option 2, this is an unlimited/uncapped package with no FUP restrictions as of April 2011 so 200GB/month seems somewhat restrictive IMHO.

As I have never gone over about 35GB in any one month, not at all restrictive for me. I suppose if I watched a lot of TV online. it might be. I suspect that seems to be the main consumer of bandwidth for most people these days.

[herulach]

This month probably not more than 10gb, last month, knocking on 400, reinstalled most of the games in my steam library.

[Funkstar]

I think we do about 30GB/month in our house with a cap of 60GB.

Will be interesting to see if this increases when I install the new AP I ordered. Finally replacing the little Edimax that seems to be on the way out with a Ubiquiti UniFi AP.

[deejayburnout]

We have unlimited Sky at ours with 20mb speed.
At our house we churn through data. I can imagine it's very high.
Netflix is used daily and my wife has watch 2 seasons of buffy the vampire slayer and 1 season of this redneck drama program.

I am guessing that each 40min HD episode is 1GB so that's 72gb right away.

The kids also watch all the cartoons on it as well at the same time.

Then you can add all the wrestling/dj mixes I download plus the wife and I online gaming.

200gb might do it but will be close.

[MrComputerSaint]

I haven't really changed my download habits, the stuff I want just comes quicker. Really I don't need 60Mb internet. (although I did only sign up for 30Mb)

[Biscuit]

i was on a 250GB a month plusnet package before i moved house and both myself and my flatmate gamed and downloaded fairly heavily but never came close to it. One thing to bare in mind is that the limit is usually a 'peak time' limit so at night between midnight and 8am you are not restricted at all.

[aidanjt]

Depends on the person, I'm a heavy internet user, any TV shows I watch will come over my internet connection, as do my game purchases via steam, and I can easily exceed 600GB in a month if I have a lot to grab or send.

[directhex]

According to BT I burn 250GB a month

[b0redom]

Last month I burst through my 200GB limit for the first time ever. I've had VDSL for a year now. I did have both kids (and me) streaming HD kids telly from Netflix, bought a new NUC (which needed Win7 + all the patches), etc etc Turns out Netflix eats ~ 1GB/45 min TV episode at 720p. I was also constantly RDPing (over SSH to home).

I'm not sure if that was a blip or not, but I just called up Zen to ask about moving to a higher usage package, and it turns out they're upgrading everyone on the 200GB/month limit to 500GB/month. There's no way I'll currently hit that (at the moment).

[KeyboardDemon]

As I have never gone over about 35GB in any one month, not at all restrictive for me. I suppose if I watched a lot of TV online. it might be. I suspect that seems to be the main consumer of bandwidth for most people these days.

I didn't know what my monthly usage was until just now when I checked, I never really had any interest in those sorts of statistics to tell the truth, because I have an unlimited account, I checked just now and found my monthly average is about 265gb.

I live in a large(ish) household, 8 people, only myself and my nephew (he is staying with us while he studies for his degree) are 'heavy' internet users, in January I got Battlefield 4 for my PC my nephew got it for his PC (we got 1 copy free with an R9 290X GPU) so that was 60gb of download just there, then as it was taking too long to play from my HDD I uninstalled BF4 and reinstalled it on my SSD so that's another 30GB (I just couldn't stand the way in which I would start a game after everyone else had already captured some of the points in Domination) and then another 2.4GB was used up with the latest (Mantle) patch. My nephew streams a lot of Netflix movies, I use Youtube a lot, so do my wife and kids. Plus video on demand through Sky as well.

[peterb]

Thank you for the responses so far - as I suspected, it is TV/you tube that is the main user - I'm not sure how much gaming uses.

The query was prompted by Zen doubling my usage from 100 to 200GB/month (and for those on 200, like b0rdom - from 200 to 500).

[b0redom]

Gaming is probably fractional usage. All that is really needed once you've got the client is co-ordinates etc I would imagine.

[MrComputerSaint]

I used to use a program called Net Monitor Pro (the free one, not sure if it is still free) but it'd record how much download each application was using at that time and then give me a graph at the end of the day / week / month / year as to the download.

It is another process to run but gives a good example of what 1 machine is doing on the network.

Although this was the days of USB ADSL modems when I only had 1 machine on the Internet - Thank god for wireless!