An interesting statistic from Ofcom via the BBC is that on average users download 17Gb a month. Well for a long time I’ve had a niffty tool called vnstat running on my firewall. The advantage is that it monitors all traffic flowing in and out the house regardless of which machine in my network was involved. So it’s a very accurate picture, which is…

   month         rx      |      tx      |   total
-------------------------+--------------+--------------------------------------
  May '11      16.23 GB  |   556.46 MB  |    16.77 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%
  Jun '11      26.92 GB  |   943.50 MB  |    27.84 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:
  Jul '11      26.80 GB  |   915.03 MB  |    27.70 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:
  Aug '11      24.39 GB  |   881.12 MB  |    25.25 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:
  Sep '11      18.22 GB  |   728.12 MB  |    18.93 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%:
  Oct '11      20.48 GB  |     3.83 GB  |    24.31 GB   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%:::

Phew! it’s around 20Gb a month which isn’t too far off average. I had thought it might be a lot higher since I only watch TV via iPlayer. The jump up in transmitted bytes tx is because I’m now storing critical backups (encrypted of course) on UbuntuOne for off-site backup. Mind you it’s all about to go through the roof once I start the more practical portions of my research which will require downloading software repositories for analysis.