OpenVault spots rise of broadband's 'extreme power users'

Broadband technology supplier OpenVault has seen data usage trends evolve as broadband services have become faster and ubiquitous.

Some 13 years ago, OpenVault defined a "power user" as a broadband customer who consumed 250 gigabytes of data per month or more. Since then, that definition has expanded to broadband customers who consume 1 to 2 terabytes per month.

In a preview of the company's next quarterly Broadband Insights report, OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau says the company is now starting to track a new cohort of "extreme power users" who chew up 5TB or more per month. It's a small but impactful group of customers that OpenVault has seen grow by 40% when compared to anonymized broadband usage data that was analyzed last year.

Trudeau says the extreme power user is a type of customer that cable operators and other Internet service providers (ISPs) will need to be especially wary of given their impact on shared networks. In some cases, just one customer can be consuming 80% of available bandwidth.

And while many extreme power users are already on speeds of 1 Gbit/s or more, he notes that about 7% of them are on speeds of 100Mbit/s or less, providing operators with a clear upgrade opportunity.

In this podcast recorded at the recent Cable-Tec Expo in Denver, Trudeau also expands on OpenVault's news at the show, including the integration of the company's profile management application (PMA) with cOS, which is Harmonic's recently rebranded virtual cable modem termination system (vCMTS). OpenVault also announced this week that NOS, an operator based in Portugal, has signed up to deploy OpenVault's PMA technology in 2024.

Related:OpenVault nabs VelociData to fuel pursuit of Tier 1s, global expansion

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