The firm OpenVault, a provider of software that measures data consumption for ISPs reported that the average monthly data use by households grew from 201.6 gigabytes in 2017 to 268.7 gigabytes in 2018 – a growth rate of 33%. The company also reported that the medium use per household grew from 103.6 gigabytes in 2017 to 145.2 gigabytes in 2018 – a growth rate of 40%. The medium represents the midpoint of users, with half of all households above and half below the medium.

To some degree, these statistics are not news because we’ve known for a long time that broadband usage at homes, both in total download and in desired speeds has been doubling every three years since the early 1980s. The growth in 2018 is actually a little faster than that historical average and if the 2018 growth rate was sustained, in three years usage would grow by 235%. What I find most impressive about these new statistics is the magnitude of the annual change – the average home used 67 more gigabytes of data per month in 2018 than the year before – a number that would have seemed unbelievable only a decade ago when the average household used a total of only 25 gigabytes per month.

There are still many in the industry who are surprised by these numbers. I’ve heard people claim that now that homes are watching all the video they want that the rate of growth is bound to slow down – but if anything, the rate of growth seems to be accelerating. We also know that cellular data consumption is also now doubling every two years.

This kind of growth has huge implications for the industry. From a network perspective, this kind of bandwidth usage puts a big strain on networks. Typically the most strained part of a network is the backbones that connect to neighborhood nodes. That’s the primary stress point in many networks, including FTTH networks, and when there isn’t enough bandwidth to a neighborhood then everybody’s bandwidth suffers. Somebody that designed a network ten years ago would never have believed the numbers that OpenVault is reporting and would likely not have designed a network that would still be sufficient today.

One consequence of the bandwidth growth is that it’s got to be driving homes to change to faster service providers when they have the option. A household that might have been happy with a 5 Mbps or 10 Mbps connection a few years ago is likely no longer happy with it. This has to be one of the reasons we are seeing millions of homes each year upgrade from DSL to cable modem each year in metropolitan areas. The kind of usage growth we are seeing today has to be accelerating the death of DSL.

This growth also should be affecting policy. The FCC set the definition of broadband at 25/3 Mbps in January of 2015. If that was a good definition in 2015 then the definition of broadband should have been increased to 63 Mbps in 2019. At the time the FCC set that threshold I thought they were a little generous. In 2014, as the FCC was having this debate, the average home downloaded around 100 gigabytes per month. In 2014 the right definition of broadband was probably more realistically 15 – 20 Mbps and the FCC was obviously a little forward-looking in setting the definition. Even so, the definition of broadband should be increased – if the right definition of broadband in 2014 was 20 Mbps, then today the definition of broadband ought to have been increased to 50 Mbps today.

The current FCC is ignoring these statistics for policy purposes – if they raise the definition of broadband then huge numbers of homes will be classified as not having broadband. The FCC does not want to do that since they are required by Congressional edict to make sure that all homes have broadband. When the FCC set a realistic definition of broadband in 2015 they created a dilemma for themselves. That 2015 definition is already obsolete and if they don’t change it, in a few years it is going to be absurdly ridiculous. One only has to look forward three years from now, when the definition of broadband ought to be 100 Mbps.

These statistics also remind us of the stupidity of handing out federal subsidies to build technologies that deliver less than 100 Mbps. We still have two more years of CAF II construction to upgrade speeds to an anemic 10 Mbps. We are still handing out new subsidies to build networks that can deliver 25/3 Mbps – networks that are obsolete before they are completed.

Network designers will tell you that they try to design networks to satisfy demands at least seven years into the future (which is the average life of many kinds of fiber electronics). If broadband usage keeps doubling every three years, then looking forward seven years to 2026, the average home is going to download 1.7 terabytes per month and will expect download speeds of 318 Mbps. I wonder how many network planners are using that target?

The final implications of this growth are for data caps. Two years ago when Comcast set a terabyte monthly data cap they said that it affected only a few homes – and I’m sure they were right at the time. However, the OpenVault statistics show that 4.12% of homes used a terabyte per month in 2018, almost double from 2.11% in 2017. We’ve now reached that point when the terabyte data cap is going to have teeth, and over the next few years a lot of homes are going to pass that threshold and have to pay a lot more for their broadband. While much of the industry has a hard time believing the growth statistics, I think Comcast knew exactly what they were doing when they established the terabyte cap that seemed so high just a few years ago.