While U.S. consumers and broadband service providers spar over usage limits, even if most users never even come close to the caps, one of Belgium's Telenet users does deserve "data hog" title.
Between the beginning of July through early August, one Telenet customer consumed 2.7 terabytes of data. Not far behind, three other users consumed 1.9 Tb, 1.5 Tb and 1.3 Tb of data. Of course, these numbers are at the extreme usage end with only one user on its network going over 2 Tb in a month and another seven users exceeding 1 Tb.
Although broadband usage caps may have become a controversial issue, Telenet, which released a list of its top 25 downloaders, said it does not want to punish power users. Instead, the service provider wants to drive existing users from its low-priced plans (50 Gb and 80 Gb usage caps) to what its higher priced "fair use" broadband plans.
Belgium may be home to the 2.7 Tb user but that pales in comparison to the U.S. where there have been reports of some users consuming up to 4 Tb in a given month. These power users, however, are more exceptions than the rule as most typical users consume an average of 2 Gb per month.
For more:
- ars technica has this article
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