The latest Broadband Insights Report from Ookla shows broadband statistics for the end of the third quarter of 2022.
The average household used 495.5 gigabits of broadband per month in the quarter. That is the combination of 474.2 gigabytes of download and 32.3 gigabytes of upload.
What Ookla calls power users continues to climb. 13.7% of homes used more than 1 terabyte per month. 2.1% of all households use more than 2.1 terabytes.
The speeds of household broadband subscriptions continue to migrate to faster speeds. A lot of this is ISPs arbitrarily giving consumers faster speeds. But there are also a lot of folks opting to buy faster speeds. Only 13.1% of homes are now subscribed to speeds under 100 Mbps. 15.4 Percent of homes are subscribing to gigabit or faster broadband speeds.
| Subscribers | 3Q 2020 | 3Q 2021 | 3Q 2022 |
| Under 50 Mbps | 18.8% | 9.8% | 4.7% |
| 50 – 99 Mbps | 19.9% | 8.0% | 8.4% |
| 100 – 199 Mbps | 36.4% | 38.4% | 9.9% |
| 200 – 499 Mbps | 14.1% | 27.4% | 54.8% |
| 500 – 999 Mbps | 5.2% | 5.1% | 6.7% |
| 1 Gbps+ | 5.6% | 11.4% | 15.4% |
I always wonder when I see one of these monthly reports where the current quarter fits into broadband trends. The following chart shows the average household usage by quarter reported by Ookla since the beginning of 2019.
This chart shows a clear pattern. It shows that broadband usage is strongest in the fourth quarter of each year. The usage dips a bit for the next several quarters each year. This trend was confounded by the pandemic when the first quarter usage spiked over the end of 2019. But from that point forward, the expected trend continued.
But the overall trend is clear, and usage is growing over time. Home broadband usage spiked during the pandemic when 2020 usage was more than 40% higher than in 2019. Usage then grew by 11% from 2020 to 2021 and grew by 14% from 2021 until 2022. Household broadband usage has grown 80% from the third quarter of 2019 until 3Q of this year.