Purge Pay TV, Binge on Data: Cord-Cutters Are Gulping Down Bandwidth

If you don’t pay for cable, and you get all your video from the Internet instead, how much bandwidth do you eat up each month? Quite a bit, it turns out. Much more than everyone else.

Sandvine, the broadband networking company that provides periodic reports on Web usage, says that the top 15 percent of streaming video users go through 212 gigabytes of data month. That’s more than seven times the average broadband user, who uses 29 gigabytes.

As heavy broadband users start bumping up against data caps, it will also highlight the way that some broadband providers differentiate between digital video they send through their own “managed service” pipes -- which doesn’t count against usage caps -- versus digital video served up by the likes of Netflix, which does count against caps.