Talked to my ISP, mediacom, and found out what their highest bandwidth user was.
 

Mediacom recently implemented bandwidth cutoffs for customers and I figured I'd use it to get out of my contract of 1 mbps up and 15 mbps down. My down has been fine but when doing server work that involves affiliate I like bandwidth for getting videos up.
They have higher plans of 50 down and 5 up and 100 down and 10 up.

Anyway...

Apparently they've been calling some of their highest users, I couldn't resist so I asked, "what was the amount of the highest user?"

...

4TB!

The only way I can think to consume that much legally was large server backups that are downloaded locally.
I discussed with the person that anyone beyond a certain point it's pretty much a given they aren't using it for legitimate means. Anyway, thought I'd share that with you as on slashdot it made news that someone in Sweden had consumed just over 3TB.

There's only so much netflix and Linux ISOs you can download. :)

That's less than 400 hd (1080) movies from a torrent site. Or maybe 300 and a few dozen big games. If i wanted to i could probably do that in a week maybe?
Obviously i don't use anywhere near that amount but i don't think it is that much. Most "professional" pirates must be doing that much bw.

Hm i take it you're talking monthly? If daily yes then it's insane.

3tb was big news?
When was that? 5 years ago?

a lot of video submitters are using servers these days arent they? Windows servers to utilize like desktops to send videos?

Talk to yourself much? Oh, wait - Yes, you do! Nevermind.

Yes monthly, I really don't think that would be possible for most home users even if they tried, 4TB a day. Most servers in the world never have to put up with that bandwidth, only on the largest sites.

4TB, you really have to try as a consumer to download that much. If you are downloading backups and big data of some kind, sure, but typically not.

This is something I really need to look into. I have some experience with remote desktops, not outside of school much though.

4TB in a month is about 12.5Mbps average & sustained. Not a huge amount if it's off a server, but for a consumer downloading it is pretty high.

I still remember the days of 33.6k modems, someone downloading 4 GIGS in a month would be considered an excessive user :)

So you missed the days of 2400 baud modems? Lucky you.

Nah, I started out with a 300bps accoustic coupled modem, but I doubt the internet was very big at the time. My first permanent internet connection in 1996 cost $USD390 per gigabyte downloaded, or roughly $124,000 per Mbps.

I'm with Mediacom also, and I have 350GB/mo usage, probably gonna upgrade soon, I do roughly 300GB/mo

If you used your 15mb down at full throttle that would be well over 4tb a month - Its not that much...

If I used 100% of my home broadband that would be about 25tb a month.