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Bandwidth Usage Update

Mar 4, 2009

In my recent post on analyzing bandwidth usage, I promised an update once February was done. Seeing as it's now March, it's time for said update. Here's the graph of my bandwidth usage for the month of February:

I didn't break the 40 GB barrier, but I wasn't far from it this month at 37 GB. The highest daily total was 3304 MB on February 2, though several other days came close to that total. This is the first month that I haven't noticed any interesting trends, but it's still enjoyable to chart my activity. As I predicted, my daily average seems higher this month, thanks to my Roku player and Netflix Watch Instantly. If I break the barrier in March, I'll be sure to let everyone know. It appears Time Warner has done their homework on their proposed upper limit...

hardware

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2 Comments

Dustin

1:16 PM on Mar 4, 2009

I like the week of the 15th, how it ramps up. Each day using more and more bandwidth. Can you align this graph with the days you watched a streaming Netflix movie? I'm guessing you didn't watch 2 full movies streaming on any one day. I would guess that the days that are over 2500MB are the days you watched a movie on your Roku. If so, it looks that a 2 hour movie is about 2000MB.

Jonah

5:04 PM on Mar 4, 2009

Here's a brief overview of how the largest bars in the graph above align with my Netflix usage. I'll present the date, and the items I watched:

Feb 2: Star Trek Season 1 ("The Naked Time"), Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", Fawlty Towers ("The Germans")
Feb 3: Star Trek Season 1 ("The Enemy Within"), Nature: Ireland
Feb 14: Enter the Dragon
Feb 18: Vertigo
Feb 19: Star Trek Season 1 ("The Menagerie: Part 1"), Star Trek Season 1 ("The Menagerie: Part 2")
Feb 28: Star Trek Season 1 ("Balance of Terror"), Fawlty Towers ("Waldorf Salad")

The spikes on the 10th, 20th, and 26th don't match up with any Netflix activity, so I'm not exactly sure what they correspond to. I know I played a lot more Team Fortress 2 during the last week in February (thanks to the new Scout update), so that probably explains at least a portion of the spike on the 26th. In preparation for the update, I also played TF2 on a number of days leading up to the scout update release. I've also been doing a fair amount of web development in recent times, so that could also account for some small fraction of the data (doing hard page refreshes). Plenty of the spikes I mention in the list above also don't fully account for their daily totals. I surf a bunch of sites in the evening, so that's undoubtedly a good portion that's going unnoticed. One hour of streaming is roughly equivalent to 1 GB (I watched one-hour Star Trek episodes on Feb 4 and 5).

Bandwidth Usage Update

2 Comments

Dustin

Jonah

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