There’s a lot of good news for the broadband ecosystem in OpenVault’s report on the industry during the second quarter of the year.
The firm found that average subscriber usage hit 664.2 GB, super power users — those who consume more than two terabytes per month — increased by 5%.
Monthly average consumption during the second quarter was 664.2 GB, a 13.4% increase over the 585.8 GB recorded in the second quarter of last year. Total consumption increased 1.0 GB between the first to the second quarter. That breaks the historical pattern of first to second quarter declines.
The idea that profile management application (PMA) technology could increase broadband network resource optimization and increase efficiency of DOCSIS 3.1 utilization was validated by the report. The report says that the portion of total channels with more than half of their modems in partial-service mode was 3.1% after the implementation of PMA. The percentage was 11.6% prior to PMA.
The OpenVault report found that upstream broadband traffic increased 17.9% year-over-year. That is the second most on record — following only the 55.8% increase caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
“This OVBI details 2025’s shifting consumption trends, including distinct growth patterns within specific tiers of service, as well as the continued impact of growing upstream usage,” the broadband traffic report says.
“The report also leverages findings from deployments of OpenVault’s Profile Management Application (Vantage PMA) and the OpenVault Proactive Network Management (Vantage PNM) tools to explore network metrics that are critical to maintaining performance and subscriber Quality of Experience (QoE).”
Bandwidth consumption dynamics seem to be changing. If so, it seems to be a long-tail impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic exploded the amount of work, education and entertainment in the home. Much of it was upstream.
There was a milestone during the third quarter of last year as upstream broadband traffic increased twice as fast as downstream traffic, according to the OpenVault report for that period.
The firm found that year-over-year upstream traffic increased 13.9%, while downstream increased by 6.8%. Overall traffic growth was 7.2%, according to the report.
