Broadband Users Consume 11.4 Gbytes Per Month

A survey by Cisco finds that about 10% of the world's broadband subscribers generate more than 60% of all Internet traffic, with the average connection chewing up about 11.4 Gigabytes of Internet traffic per month. Meanwhile, the top 1% heaviest global subscribers account more than 20% of all traffic, Cisco found. The networking company's Visual Networking Index (VNI) Usage report represents activity during the third quarter of 2009 aggregated from cable, wireline telco, and mobile providers in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and various emerging markets. Globally, the average broadband connection consumes about 4.3 Gbytes of video and other "visual networking applications" (such as social networking) per month. That's the equivalent of approximately 1.1 hours of Internet video, according to Cisco. Peer-to-peer traffic represented about 38% of all Internet traffic, which was a significant decrease from Cisco's earlier pilot studies that showed P2P accounting for more than half of all bandwidth used.