As a country we have a very short memory when it comes to broadband. Anybody in their late 40s or older clearly remembers twenty-five years ago when the predominant form of broadband was dial-up and we were seeing the first DSL and cable modem trials in the market. But I think most people have forgotten about the state of broadband just ten years ago.
I admit I have the same time bias. I was cleaning out some old bookmarks, and I ran across several articles from ten years that surprised me. The big difference between 2014 and now is broadband speeds. Consider the following map that was published in the Washington Post in early 2014. This shows the average broadband download speed in the U.S. was 18.2 Mbps. The maps shows the parts of the country where speeds were faster or slower than average.
To put these speeds on this map into context, the FCC adopted the updated definition of broadband of 25/3 Mbps in 2015 – updated from 4/1 Mbps. At the time, there were critics who said that 25/3 Mbps was a ridiculously high definition, which can be understood when seeing the large parts of the country on this map where average speeds were under 10 Mbps. The map is an interesting way to see where fiber had already been widely built in 2014, mostly in Verizon FiOS markets in the Northeast and some of the PUDs in Washington. Many other smaller areas had fiber, but are not large enough to be seen on a map at this scale.
In 2014, the national broadband penetration rate was around 80% of households, up from 20% of homes ten years earlier. 2014 is the year when the 18-34 age group spent more time online than watching television (the first this had ever happened for any age group).
Video streaming was becoming a big deal, and Netflix had 48 million customers by the end of 2014. In looking back at blogs and articles, there was widespread complaints about pixelated video streams. Livestreaming was still in its infancy and the Superbowl was livestreamed in 2014 by NBC along with a Verizon mobile app.
Video conferencing was also in its infancy, and before 2014 most videoconferencing required specialized hardware. Skype became the predominant software-based videoconferencing platform, in 2014, but was mostly used for business meetings. Apple users had been using FaceTime for one-on-one video conferencing since 2010.
Ten years ago is also when the cable company first started to lose customers. The year ending March 31, 2013 was the first 12-month period where the big cable companies collectively lost net cable TV customers. At the end of 2013 there were over 8 million homes that had cut the cord, but the cable companies had continued to add new customers to replace those who were leaving.
Apple sold 40% of cellphones in 2014 and Samsung had a 21% market share. BlackBerry still held a 5% market share.
How many of you remember the broadband speed you were buying in 2014? In 2013 I was served by a WISP that delivered about 5 Mbps. In 2014 I moved and subscribed to Comcast, but I can’t recall the speed they provided – my fuzzy memory says it was 30 Mbps.
The bottom line from this look back is a recognition of the extraordinary strides we’ve made with broadband speeds in just ten years. Cable companies now routinely offer gigabit speeds and millions of new fiber passings are being built every year. FWA cellular is bringing pockets of 100+ Mbps all around the country. New fixed wireless radios now have big bandwidth capabilities. I don’t think anybody in 2014 could have predicted where we are today with broadband.
You can thank Google Fiber for being the catalyst that changed everything. Without their entry into the market, and its very high profile, I think it would have been many years before we saw this same level of fiber deployment.
I don’t agree with that even remotely. multiple cable cos were offering a ~1G plan by that time. Google wasn’t a catalyst, the market was already moving that way. If anything, google’s struggles showed how difficult it is to actually pull off and may have dampened things a bit.
Cable co’s ability to offer high speeds on DOCSIS 3.0 to negate potential competition from wireless and DSL set the stage and then a massive rush of cloud hosting needs most of the credit.
No other tech 10 years ago could actually compete with DOCSIS except fttx and DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades were moving slow since a lot of capex was already spent on 3.0. DOCSIS 4.0 still a few years out and even in 2024 it’s all but vapor. It wasn’t until about 2022 that other products like g.fast and mmwave wireless really become available and probably not until 2024 that those systems because practical and stable. So until just recently, it was old coax, or new fiber.
the final push here is the government’s want to build more permanent solutions and fiber is at least in theory far more upgradable/future proof. The vast majority of fiber builds have been on government funding.
Back to google, they basically proved that you couldn’t typically build it profitably at scale without government money.
Regardless of what you remotely disagree with, your facts are wrong. Comcast first announced a $400 gigabit product in 2015 that was mostly a phantom product since it was only available to customers within a few hundred feet of a cable node. I always assumed this was an early field trial for a few beta customers for using EPON FTTP modems – and the nationwide announcement of that effort was broadband by press release only. The two big cable companies started it tell some cities that they would be able to offer gigabit speeds in 2016, but they two companies didn’t offer a gigabit fiber product in any meaningful way until 2017 – and even then they introduced it first only in those markets where they were competing against gigabit fiber like Austin, Atlanta, etc.
And you also learned the wrong lesson from Google. What they learned was that you don’t create the huge staff ahead of getting the customers. Google fiber become quite financially successful once they right-sized staffing, and they’ve grown to have a million fiber customers.
The Google Fiber journey has been an interesting one. It began with the big bang in 2010 with a contest to be the first build. About 1100 localities shouted “Choose us!” demonstrating enormous pent up demand for FTTP delivered telecom.
I generally agree with dandenson that the lesson taken was was telecom infrastructure is too capital and time intensive to be a 10x Google project. Google pared it back in 2017 when it realized it offered no exponential technological, cost or marketing advantage over legacy incumbent telephone and cable companies. As Google advisor and co-founder Larry Page put it, “There’s no flying-saucer shit in laying fiber.” AT&T mocked it as a bumbling rookie as it paused fiber infrastructure deployment in several U.S. metro areas in 2017 including even its Silicon Valley home.
It will be interesting to watch its rebrand GFiber, which is competing head to head with AT&T fiber in the Las Vegas metro. Its parent Alphabet this year announced it’s looking to spin it off.
https://eldotelecom.blogspot.com/2024/02/report-gfiber-parent-alphabet-seeks.html
Doug, Google fiber wasn’t a ‘serious’ product until 2017 either, so 1G coax plans and google fiber we’re practically arriving at the same time.
Google has what 1/2 a million subs? Comcast has 32 million. Spectrum another 32 million. 80% of homes have a DOCSIS provider with up to 1G plans today. fttx doesn’t actually represent a dramatically better product than docsis 3.1 for most consumers (even docsis 3.0), it represents a new company that is ‘free’ of cableco junk. For the typical consumer that can get 1G they tend to choose the base package. Something like 85% of spectrum users buy the cheapest offering. A nation claimed to have an enormous appetite for 1G services keeps buying whatever the cheapest plan is. Spectrum and Comcast are losing as many subscribers to cell carriers home services as they are to fttx builds.
There is no cost advantage to fttx vs coax, generally a hybrid network of ftt->cmts and coax to prem is MUCH less expensive to install and maintain. possible a full order of magnitude less. It still offers a XGPON competative 6-9Gbps per port deliverable speeds. Service on a hybrid plant is also much lower cost, technicians requiring less training, not needing splice trailers, simpler to repair cabling, etc.
In my opinion, google was just a much more respected company that the cable cos and the excitement was as much ‘google save us from comcast’ as it was the speed number, but like in fast cars you argue about your brands horsepower not your dislike for the other brands.
I don’t make a correlation in them starting some trend. The cablecos developed an incredibly bad reputation. The moment a new technology arrived that could compete, and that technology wasn’t running on coax and so could often dodge municipal franchise agreements for single coax providers etc, it was on. Technology started this, not google.