Average bandwidth usage per sec/min/hr/etc for home user?

[plastick]

I was just considering switching ISP's because my current one, Charter Communication, keeps raising prices on me, literally three or more times per year...

Currently I have 16 meg down and 2 meg up for bandwidth but I doubt I even use that much at a given time and think its pretty wasteful to have if I dont even use it to its full potential. I mention this because I've been looking around at other local ISPs and there are some really cheap alternatives but they have speeds like 2, 4, or 6 megs. I am not really sure if I would notice a difference or not. The only things I do that might use a lot of contiguous data transfer is gaming: Modern Warfare 2 and Starcraft 2. Other than that I just use the internet but I don't use BT or have a server or anything... so I dont really care about getting large ass files transferred at "blazing speeds"...

So my question is if anyone knows about how much the average home user uses for internet bandwidth at a given time for general activity including gaming.

Right now I have about 3 systems on a home network that use internet and they are Vista and Windows 7 boxes... considering they are not infected with viruses or bloated with software that is connecting to remote hosts, I would consider myself to be using minimal bandwidth at any given time -- except when me or the wife are on youtube or gaming.

Wouldn't 4 or 6 megs be more than sufficient for surfing and gaming?

 

[jimhsu]

The thing is that residential broadband usage is very "bursty". While average utilization is very low (probably on the order of kilobytes a second (so wolframalpha tells me), peak usage can be up to megabytes/sec (on cable connections). Hence ISPs use massive overprovisioning, etc to actually make a profit while providing "high speed internet" to people.

Whether 4 to 6 mbps is enough really depends on your burstiness and usage model ... for example, while I really don't need my 20 mbps downstream from comcast, I do need my 4 mbps upload (online backup literally sucks up hundreds of gigs of bandwidth). I'd rather get, say, a 5/5 connection than a 20/2 or even a 50/2, but residential connections aren't sold that way. And I'm not moving back to DSL-like upload speeds (256kbps? Really?).