How much internet (bandwidth) do I use?

I was curious as to how much bandwidth I actually use. Since I am no longer on the amazingly fast dorm room connection at UofL I thought I would do a little test. And by test, I mean 1 month long test. I installed NetLimited on my desktop, my main computer. While this test didn't measure the actual total amount of bandwidth I have used in a month, it is fairly close. I have been using my laptop a limited amount, the Wii doesn't use that much, and my Skype Phone isn't used enough to make a sizable impact.

What this is really measuring is my big uploads and downloads. I am a HUGE consumer of online video. I subscribe to over 30 podcasts and will regularly stream content from YouTube and Hulu. The regular big downloads for me come from Revision3 and my other podcasts I watch. Many of them approach 300MB in file size. I am a fan of the HD versions, the look great on my computer screens. In addition to all of the free content I download, I have started renting moves from Amazon Unboxed. The download is typically fast enough to start watching a move in less than 3-5 minutes.

My uploading is actually higher than my downloading. Most people may be suspicious of this, but since I use Carbonite to backup all of my documents, including some rather large files, it does add up. I uploaded 51GB of data to Carbonite in the month of May. Now, you may be asking where all of these large files come from.

Just because I am a big consumer of internet content doesn't mean I am also not a big publisher as well. I have my digital camera and a Flickr account. This means I end up doing some major uploading from time to time. For example I just uploaded 360 pictures of the Kentucky High School State Track Meet yesterday. In addition to uploading pictures, I upload video on a regular basis. Between Tablet Tips and uploading random videos to my personal YouTube account, it starts to add up. Take into account those videos are uploaded twice, once for the upload and once to Carbonite, it makes sense I upload more than I download. My internet upload speed tends to be saturated for long periods of time while I push my content into the cloud.

So, having installed NetLimiter over a month ago I have statistics for an entire month. Here is the breakdown for my daily upload and download:


The interesting thing to notice are the days where the upload is always almost 5 GB. This just happens to be Carbonite's daily limit. I am probably an exception to the standard person primarily because of my use of online backup. However, I still think that this information was interesting enough to publish.