ISP's top data hog gobbles 2.7TB of data in a month

 ISPs sometimes complain about "data hogs," often in the service of ridiculously tight-fisted data caps on Internet service. But there are users who deserve the porcine label, and Belgian ISP Telenet recently offered a rare picture of them. Can you imagine downloading 2,680GB of data in a single month?

One Belgian can. Between July 4 and August 6 of this year, Telenet's single largest user slurped up 2.7TB of data. He was followed by similarly impressive downloaders who transferred 1.9TB, 1.5TB, and 1.3 TB.

These numbers drop off quickly, though. Only a single user on the entire network topped 2TB in a month, while another seven topped 1TB.

Telenet recently published a list of its top 25 downloaders to a discussion forum—but the goal wasn't to demonize the users. Instead, it was to show other people just how much data could be transferred in a single month. The ISP hopes to encourage people to migrate up from its least-expensive plans (with 50GB and 80GB data caps, respectively) to its more expensive "fair use" plans.

In this case, "fair use" doesn't refer to copyright but to downloading. Telenet doesn't want to call its plans "unlimited," but it does say that "'fair use' means that you can send and receive a very large quantity of data via the Telenet network. Telenet will only ask you to adjust your consumption in the case of excessive volume consumption that may threaten the comfort of other subscribers."

If you turn out to be an "excessive" user (double the average data use for your speed tier), Telenet can throttle you down to 512 Kbps until your next billing period begins. Oh, and subscribers can only use this bandwidth to "disseminate legal data."

According to Rudolf van der Berg, a Dutch Internet consultant and policy analyst, Telenet has the fastest network in the area, so this list "pretty much is the top 25 [downloaders] for Belgium."

Still, the Belgians have nothing on Americans when it comes to downloads. One US ISP told me last year that a single user had transferred 4TB of data in a single month from a consumer Internet account, and we've received reports from readers who have been warned by their ISPs after sucking a cool terabyte of data down their home pipes in a month.

Such numbers are outliers, of course. ISPs have told us that average broadband user is in the range of 2-6GB per user, but you can see why some ISPs like Comcast prefer to set high monthly limits to rein in the few peak users, who can use more bandwidth (and, more importantly, cause more local congestion on a cable line) than hundreds of other customers combined.