Driven in part by video conferencing, broadband usage spiked to a record high on Easter Sunday, according to data from OpenVault. Easter Sunday downstream consumption hit 16.3 GB per subscriber, which marked an increase of almost 16% over the previous Sunday (14.1 GB) and of 37.9% over Sunday, March 1 (11.8 GB), the latter of which was before COVID-19 social distancing measures started to take effect.
OpenVault, which collects U.S. cable subscribers' usage behaviors and puts them into data sets, said upstream usage per subscriber on Easter Sunday was 0.97 GB, up 18.6% over the previous Sunday upstream high of 0.81 GB on April 5 and 51.7% over the 0.64 GB on March 1.
Total Easter Sunday consumption was 17.3 GB per subscriber. The previous Sunday per subscriber highs for total consumption and downstream usage were 15.97 GB and 15.17 GB, respectively, on March 22 of this year.
“While we don’t track specific types of activity, I can tell you that videoconferencing absolutely contributed to data usage in the Trudeau household,” said Mark Trudeau, CEO and founder of OpenVault, in a statement. “Given the day and the profile of the usage, it’s safe to assume that much of the spike OpenVault saw was due to individuals and families conducting virtual Easter Sunday visits to friends and relatives.”
RELATED: COVID-19 broadband usage starts to plateau—OpenVault
OpenVault recently projected a new coronavirus-influenced run rate of 460 GB per subscriber per month as stay at home users rely more heavily on wireline broadband connectivity.