I ran across a website called the Gigabit Monitor that is tracking the population worldwide that has access to gigabit broadband. The website is sponsored by VIAVI Solutions, a manufacturer of network test equipment.

The website claims that in the US over 68.5 million people have access to gigabit broadband, or 21% of the population. That number gets sketchy when you look at the details. The claimed 68.5 million people includes 40.3 million served by fiber, 27.2 million served by cable company HFC networks, 822,000 served by cellular and 233,000 served by WiFi.

Each of those numbers is highly suspect. For example, the fiber numbers don’t include Verizon FiOS or the FiOS properties sold to Frontier. Technically that’s correct since most FiOS customers can buy maximum broadband speeds in the range of 800-900 Mbps. But there can’t be 40 million people other people outside of FiOS who can buy gigabit broadband from other fiber providers. I’m also puzzled by the cellular and WiFi categories and can’t imagine there is anybody that can buy gigabit products of either type.

VIAVI makes similar odd claims for the rest of the world. For example, they say that China has 61.5 million people that can get gigabit service. But that number includes 12.3 million on cellular and 6.2 million on WiFi.

Finally, the website lists the carriers that they believe offer gigabit speeds. I have numerous clients that own FTTH networks that are not listed, and I stopped counting when I counted 15 of my clients that are not on the list.

It’s clear this web site is flawed and doesn’t accurately count gigabit-capable people. However, it raises the question of how to count the number of people who have access to gigabit service. Unfortunately, the only way to do that today is by accepting claims by ISPs. We’ve already seen with the FCC broadband maps how unreliable the ISPs are when reporting broadband capabilities.

As I think about each broadband technology there are challenges in defining gigabit-capable customers. The Verizon situation is a great example. It’s not a gigabit product if an ISP caps broadband speeds at something lower than a gigabit – even if the technology can support a gigabit.

There are challenges in counting gigabit-capable customers on cable company networks as well. The cable companies are smart to market all of their products as ‘up to’ speeds because of the shared nature of their networks. The customers in a given neighborhood node share bandwidth and the speeds can drop when the network gets busy. Can you count a household as gigabit-capable if they can only get gigabit speeds at 4:00 AM but get something slower during the evening hours?

It’s going to get even harder to count gigabit capability when there are reliable cellular networks using millimeter wave spectrum. That spectrum is only going to able to achieve gigabit speeds outdoors when in direct line-of-site from a nearby cell site. Can you count a technology as gigabit-capable when the service only works outdoors and drops when walking into a building or walking a few hundred feet away from a cell site?

It’s also hard to know how to count apartment buildings. There are a few technologies being used today in the US that bring gigabit speeds to the front of an apartment building. However, by the time that the broadband suffers packet losses due to inside wiring and is diluted by sharing among multiple apartments, nobody gets a true gigabit product. But ISPs routinely count them as gigabit customers.

There is also the issue of how to not double-count households that can get gigabit speeds from multiple ISPs. There are urban markets with fiber providers like Google Fiber, Sonic, US Internet, EPB Chattanooga, and others where customers can buy gigabit broadband on fiber and also from the cable company. There are even a few lucky customers in places like Austin, Texas and the research triangle in North Carolina where some homes have three choices of gigabit networks after the telco (AT&T) also built fiber.

I’m not sure we need to put much energy into accurately counting gigabit-capable customers. I think everybody would agree an 850 to 950 Mbps connection on Verizon FiOS is blazingly fast. Certainly, a customer getting over 800 Mbps from a cable company has tremendous broadband capability. Technically such connections are not gigabit connections, but the difference between a gigabit connection and a near-gigabit connection for a household is so negligible as to not practically matter.