Using 1tb of data on the NBN is harder than it seems

Using 1tb of data is harder than it seems – at least for the average user, or so I’ve found out over the last few months.

I used to think of myself as someone that does quite a bit of downloading, apparently I have been mistaken. A few months ago I moved into a new house with a fibre connection (on the NBN for you other Australian’s out there). This was intentional, if I was buying a house to live in for potentially a long time it needed to have this.

Previously to this I had an “unlimited” ADSL2+ plan which never synced above 7mbit down 1mbit up, it was decent and got the job done however I was never able to see how much data I actually used, the particular ISP’s thoughts were something along the lines of, if you’re on an unlimited plan the amount of data you are using is of no meaning. Sure I get where you are coming from with that but it still would have been cool to see and view trends.

When I was picking an ISP for the new house, I was looking for 100/40 (100mbit down, 40mbit up) unlimited plans. I did find some, however they always seemed to be with providers that didn’t have the best of reputations. In the end I ended up going with a reputable provider on a 100/40 plan with a 1tb data limit (500gb peak, 500gb off peak between 2am-8am). Despite not being unlimited this plan actually cost more than the unlimited plans I had been looking at.

I was a bit nervous about getting a plan with a limit, if I’m getting a fast connection surely I’ll be downloading a load of content right? It seems not, and over the last two months I’ve come to realise that 1tb is more than enough for me.

I’m currently 5 days from the end of my plans month, and I have used:

peak
363,679MB used of 500,000MB

offpeak
113,880MB used of 500,000MB

daily usage trends
peak: 12,123MB
offpeak: 3,796MB

For the last week I’ve actually been downloading way more than normal as well, I recently got an 8 bay QNAP NAS and have been replacing all of my TV shows with higher quality ones which take up much more space, so despite downloading a lot of things that I want with speeds of around 8MB/s I’m still no where near hitting the limit for the month, perhaps if I started downloading like that from the minute the month rolls over I might have a chance, however I don’t think there’s enough stuff out there that I want at the moment.

So basically for me 1tb seems to be plenty, which has put some of my initial worries about it not being enough aside. I’m sure for a lot of people out there they will say it’s not enough because they do high bandwidth intense task abc, that’s fair enough however as an average user it’s plenty and I’m glad that I went with a reputable provider in the end even though it cost more compared to paying less for “unlimited”. The increase in speed is also awesome as I don’t have to wait for things to load as much, especially when it comes to streaming video content.

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