Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
Which raises my question...what do folk use the net for such that they need or want so much.
Alex
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Alex,
Everybody's needs are different, but the real "game changer" for most typical households is streaming TV - whether that's Netflix, Stan, Foxtel Now, Fetch TV, Free-to-Air catch-up content, or YouTube etc. Once your household viewing habits change to be streaming video rather than FTA TV, it's very easy to go through 200 - 300 GB per month if you're watching in HD, or two or thee times as much if you're streaming mainly 4k content. (And you need a good reliable high-speed connection to be able to watch streaming TV, especially in "peak evening hours", and this is something that many people aren't able to access on the NBN.)
From my household's perspective, pretty much the only FTA TV we watch in "real time" these days is the evening news and a few current affairs shows. We do set up a few favourite shows to record automatically, but I don't get as paranoid about missing a show as I once was - partly because there's so little worth watching, and partly because most of our favourites are available on "Catch-Up" anyway.
But it's not just about watching TV - our internet connection gets hammered by two university students (and I'm sure at least SOME of their data needs are uni-related, not just cat and music videos!
), and my partner and I are engineering / project management professionals, and the "data rooms" we need to access from home for our projects hold many tens of gigabytes of data. Add to that operating system updates, cloud back-ups of our household data, etc, and you're well into the hundreds of GB per month.
We find that our current data allowance of 550 GB per month is OK at the moment, but knowing how data usage grows exponentially (we were getting by fine on 200 MB per month about 4 - 5 years ago, then 500 MB until about two years ago), I'm expecting to need 1 TB or more within a couple of years at most. Luckily, we've got a good (non-NBN) FTTP connection which can support our present and future data needs - not all households on the NBN are as lucky as us.