Pay TV companies hate cord cutters. The logic behind that hatred seems fairly obvious: pay TV packages are huge revenue generators for these giant companies, and ditching them leads to lost revenue. But there’s another reason pay TV giants like Comcast and Time Warner Cable are afraid of the cord cutting movement. Cord cutters don’t just lead to lost revenue, they also cost companies more money than average subscribers.
According to a new report from broadband service provider Sandvine, cord cutters use much more broadband data than Internet subscribers who also pay for a TV package. This makes sense, of course, since cord cutters with no TV package stream video over the Internet much more often than other subscribers.
What may be a bit surprising, however, is just how much data cord cutters consume each month.
Sandvine says that the typical home broadband subscriber goes through an average of 29GB of data each month, Re/code reports. But households that have cut the cord use an average of 212GB per month, or about seven times more data than the bulk of ISPs’ customers.
Needless to say, the difference is massive.
Service providers charge more for Internet packages when subscribers don’t bundle broadband service with a TV package, but the difference in pricing might not be enough to account for this huge spike in data usage that is eating into cable companies’ margins.
In other words, don’t be surprised if you start seeing the idea of home broadband data caps pop up more frequently in the coming months and years.
