I wrote a recent sequence of blogs that look at the increasing demand for broadband usage. In today’s blog I’m going to look at some concrete examples of situations where broadband demand has expanded a lot faster than expected.

The first example is in schools. Ten years ago, there was a scramble to get gigabit broadband access to schools. Because of the use of the FCC’s E-rate money, a lot of schools across the country got connected to fiber and were able to buy faster broadband. The original goal was to get a gigabit connection to each school, and I remember a few years ago seeing a report that almost every school in many states met that goal. More recently, the FCC created an updated goal that schools ought to have access to at least 1 Mbps of simultaneous capacity for each student. Connected Nation published a report for 2023 saying that 74% of school districts in the country meet or exceed that goal – an increase of 57.4% since 2020.

My consulting firm interviews a lot of schools every year, and we’re hearing that the 1 Mbps goal is no longer adequate. Just recently, we heard from a school that meets that target but still can’t have all students take mandatory state performance tests on the same day. The school still has to ration broadband to make sure that too many classrooms aren’t working online at the same time. I’ve talked to schools that have established a goal of 3 – 5 Mbps per student to accommodate the way that teachers and students really use broadband.

Another example of fast growing demand is ISP backhaul. These are the broadband connections that connect local networks to the Internet. I work with a lot of small ISPs. I can remember helping folks find backbone connections a decade ago, and a typical small ISP might have purchased a connection with an overall 10-gigabit capacity but only provisioned a few gigabits of capacity on the connection. Many were amazed at the 10 gigabit capacity when they first ordered it since it felt so oversized. They assumed that the connection capacity was going to be good for many years as they added a gigabit or two once in a while.

These ISPs turned out to be wrong, and broadband demand grew to swamp the 10-gigabit connections a lot sooner than expected. It’s not hard to understand why. OpenVault has been reporting on the overall average usage of nationwide customers. According to the OpenVault data, the average broadband consumption for homes and businesses has more than tripled just since the end of 2017. At the end of 2023, the average consumption was 641 gigabytes per customer – a number that ISPs would not have believed a decade ago. However, the size of backbone connections are not based on overall broadband consumption but on the busy hour consumption – the time when an ISP’s network is the busiest. Many small ISPs have told me that busy hour traffic has grown even faster than the average consumption reported by OpenVault.

The final example of broadband demand inflation is the broadband speeds being subscribed by homes and businesses. OpenVault also reports on the subscribed speeds that people are buying nationwide, and reported the following statistics for the end of the years between 2019 and 2023.

This chart shows a rapid migration of households now buying faster broadband connections. Some of the increases came when cable companies unilaterally increased customer speeds. Since 2019, many cable companies increased 100 Mbps subscriptions to 200 or 300 Mbps. The chart also shows a big migration of customers now buying gigabit broadband. There is nobody in the country who predicted in 2019 that in four short years there would be an 11-fold increase in households subscribed to gigabit speeds. Most of these gigabit customers are paying a premium price to get the faster speeds.

There is proof of increasing broadband demand almost everywhere I look. I often talk to businesses that have upgraded to faster speeds only to find out that within a few years they need even more speed. I hear from farmers, photographers, newspapers, and others who send and receive gigantic data files that they are having a problem buying a broadband product that meets their needs.