According to a recent study, the typical American household consumes 533 GB of internet data in a month—a figure that includes everything a family does online, like working, shopping, and browsing their favorite social media feeds. For a family of two to reach this threshold, both individuals would need to be on separate video calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for an entire month.
In other words, many broadband customers couldn’t find a way to use 533 GB even if they tried. But, for United Communications customer Darrin Creech, it’s a drop in the bucket.
“I’m a four terabyte per month user,” said Darrin, an infrastructure engineer, during a recent interview with United Communications from his home office in Fairview, Tennessee. “I’ve been working remotely for 12 years, and I run nothing but video calls all day long, for about nine hours a day.”
At four terabytes a month, Darrin and his wife consume nearly eight times the household average through their normal, everyday activities, including work calls, streaming services, and staying in touch with their two grown children.
Unfortunately, the cable internet provider they were using before fiber broadband was available capped their monthly data usage at 500 GB. Not only is this limit lower than the amount of data required by the average user but Darrin was forced to pay a $10 penalty fee for every 50 GB used over the monthly limit.
As far as monthly data caps are concerned, 500 GB is relatively generous when compared to limits set by satellite internet providers, which can start at just 10 GB—not even enough data to stream a two-hour movie at 4K resolution.
“I used to get billed by Xfinity every month because I went over their data cap,” explained Darrin. “And in terms of speed, I was not getting anything near what I paid for. I was paying for 1.2 Gbps, but I never got over 800 Mbps, and that was only in the middle of the night when no one else in the neighborhood was awake.”
Cable broadband service uses outdated copper wires to connect customers to internet service. By design, each customer is forced to share the bandwidth of their cable connection with others in their service group, which could be three neighbors in a cul-de-sac or 300 homes in a large development.
As a result, the speed and reliability of one customer’s internet service are affected by the behavior of every other customer within their service group. During times of peak demand, this can lead to congestion, excessive buffering, dropped calls, and poor-quality, pixelated videos.
Additionally, shared cable connections will always result in upload speeds that are slower than download speeds—15 times slower, on average—which can significantly impact the quality of video calls, file sharing, online gaming, and other essential internet activities.
Today, Darrin is a satisfied United Communications customer and enjoys a fast, reliable internet connection through his fiber broadband service.
As a 1 Gbps monthly subscriber, Darrin and his wife are free to get the most out of their internet service with no contracts, no data caps, and matching upload and download speeds—features that are all standard for every United Communications customer.
“My speed has never slowed down, and I’ve never had any spinning wheels on my screen, even when I’ve had all my TVs on at once on different platforms running different streaming services,” said Darrin.
“I would 100 percent recommend United Communications,” he added. “The staff were amazing talking to me on the phone, and I love talking about services that are awesome. And you guys are awesome.”