I occurred to me that I have not checked my home Internet
usage in quite some time. In my last post on the topic of Internet home
bandwidth usage in https://kaplowtech.blogspot.com/2011/09/more-usage-same-cost-boom.html, it appeared that my bandwidth usage was heading towards
the then Comcast cap of 250 Gbytes per month. My calculation was accurate as was Comcast's change of policy
to remove the "cap" before the majority of their customers would have bombarded them with hate and discontent.
So,
today I took a look at my home's Internet usage and remarkably the increase
was less than 100% over period of the third quarter of 2011 to the first quarter of
2020. We have Netflix, Prime, and do a
fair amount of YouTube streaming, so I would think that our usage pattern is typical. Of course, starting
in September one of my Sons was off to college, so I am pretty sure usage was a
bit higher in August 2019 before he moved to his dormitory .
Of
course, now he is back and our family of four confined (mostly) to our home is banging on the Internet pretty hard. We are clearly streaming up a storm and Teams'ing, Zoom'ing, and Webex'ing much of our
work that our use increased by over 200% in one month.
So far,
the performance of these services has been good. It appears that the Internet is much more
resilient than some people would have you believe or to give credit to the companies and their staff
that build and operate the hundreds of networks that make it possible. Of course, there was this BGP hijack, and a proliferation of cyber attacks, but that is another story…
Finally, I am not paying a proportionately higher Internet service bill than nearly 10 years ago. What the future in pricing holds I do know know. Perhaps new services including wireless and new satellite systems may enable enough competition to keep prices down.
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