OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the second quarter of 2025. OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

One of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage per household in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the first quarter of 2021. These averages include broadband used by residential and small business customers.

The average U.S. broadband customer used 71 more downloaded gigabytes and over seven more uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this growth means over 9.4 billion more gigabytes of data are used each month than a year earlier.

One of the most interesting things about the second quarter this year is that the overall average broadband usage was slightly higher than in the first quarter. Except for the COVID year of 2020, OpenVault has always documented a seasonal drop in usage from the first to the second quarter. That’s mostly due to the OpenVault numbers being measured at the end of each quarter, and schools being out in June. But this year, there was no drop off. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues and if it represents an unexpected growth of bandwidth usage compared to recent years.

As can be seen in the table above, upload usage has been growing at a faster pace than download usage. In its previous quarterly report, OpenVault credited the 18% growth of upload usage to the increasing usage of video calls, cloud backup, IoT uplinks, and similar uses. To put the 7-gigabyte increase in average upload into context, it’s the equivalent of every household uploading an additional five standard definition movie files or two high definition movie files every month compared to a year earlier. I think the average household would be surprised by the volume of data they are uploading each month.

This report included something new, and OpenVault looked at the performance nationwide of broadband cable modems. Their findings go a long way towards explaining why a lot of customers complain about broadband performance. OpenVault shows that 13% of all broadband modems are experiencing problems. The report showed that:

• 47% of modems were critical, meaning they are significantly impaired and don’t work as intended.
• 95% of all modems experience moderate impairment.
• 67% of modems have no usage on at least one upload or download channel, meaning degraded performance.
• 99% of modems were described as flapping, meaning they go in and out of service.

OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

• 5% of broadband subscribers now use more than two terabytes of data per month.
• Median broadband speeds are also increasing and were at 431 gigabytes at the end of the second quarter. That means half of homes use less than 431 gigabytes, and half of homes use more.