Broadband power users explode, making data caps more profitable for ISPs
Usage increase “confirms the value” of data caps for ISP revenue, vendor says. …
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The number of broadband “power users”—people who use 1TB or more per month—has doubled over the past year, ensuring that ISPs will be able to make more money from data caps.
In Q3 2020, 8.8 percent of broadband subscribers used at least 1TB per month, up from 4.2 percent in Q3 2019, according to a study released yesterday by OpenVault. OpenVault is a vendor that sells a data-usage tracking platform to cable, fiber, and wireless ISPs and has 150 operators as customers worldwide. The 8.8- and 4.2-percent figures refer to US customers only, an OpenVault spokesperson told Ars.
More customers exceeding their data caps will result in more overage charges paid to ISPs that impose monthly data caps. Higher usage can also boost ISP revenue because people using more data tend to subscribe to higher-speed packages.
“As traffic has exploded during the pandemic, data aggregated from our network management tools confirms the value of usage-based billing in prompting subscribers to self-align their speed plans with their consumption,” OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau said in a press release. This helps ISPs boost their average revenue per user, he said.
For example, ISPs that impose data caps had 25-percent more gigabit-speed subscribers than ISPs that don’t impose data caps, possibly because ISPs that impose caps “often provide higher usage quotas for the gigabit tier than the slower bandwidth tiers,” OpenVault said. “This provides incentive to subscribers of UBB [usage-based billing] operators to upgrade to the faster speeds.” Overall, 5.6 percent of subscribers in OpenVault’s dataset paid for gigabit speeds,
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