Altice USA said its average broadband-only user gobbled up 556 gigabytes of data each month in the fourth quarter and that 14% of its customers exceeded 1 terabyte of 1s and 0s monthly consumption.
According to Altice USA CEO Dexter Goei, video streaming remained the biggest driver of the surge in internet usage.
Also read: Altice USA Accelerates Fiber Buildout as Broadband Slide Continues
With high-bandwidth video technology standards including 4K and HDR becoming ubiquitous, and cord-cutting customers increasingly forsaking the managed networks of telecom company pay TV suppliers for the open internet to get their TV, Altice's gawdy user numbers don't appear, at least on the surface, to be all that surprising.
But when you consider the recent growth in usage, the ol' eyebrows do get raised a little.
In May 2019, broadband networks consultancy OpenVault said that nationally, internet-only homes were using 395.7 GB a month, on average.
A year ago, OpenVault published a report suggesting that by the end of 2021, the average U.S. broadband consuming household -- including those subscribers who took video over managed network from their ISP -- would consume as much as 650 GB each lunar cycle.
The level of demand on Altice USA's networks didn't match that lofty prediction, but the cable operator's current customer usage levels are being used to justify the company's huge ongoing investments into fiber-to-the-home infrastructure.
"All of this gives us confidence we're making the right decision focusing on fiber to prove -- to future proof our network given it's the best technology that exists to support high levels of throughput and data usage with very low latency and very high reliability of service," Goei said Wednesday during Altice USA's Q4 earnings conference call with equity analysts.
