Tag Archives: broadband usage

Who Uses the Internet?

Pew Research Center released the results of a major survey that asked how Americans use the Internet, about smartphone ownership, and about the digital divide. There were over 5,000 completed surveys conducted in the first half of 2025.

Home Broadband

About 78% of respondents live in a home that has a broadband subscription. That’s an interesting statistic since there have been past FCC reports that say that as many as 88% of homes have broadband. I wrote a blog once about the difficulty of counting homes in the US. It’s not obvious how to account for second homes and abandoned homes, as we’ve seen in the FCC fabric. But Pew’s results are based on the number of people and not homes. Some of the differences between Pew and FCC data would include large groups of people like the unhoused and members of the military who don’t live in a home.

The Pew survey shows that there is still a big difference in broadband penetration related to household incomes. 94% of those in households with an annual household income over $100,000 have a broadband subscription, while only 54% of those with household incomes under $30,000 have broadband. This highlights the essence of the still prevalent digital divide. There was a lot of hope that the federal ACP plan that provided a $30 monthly subsidy would help millions of households afford broadband, but the ACP experiment ended not long after it started.

There is also a difference depending on where people live. The broadband subscription rate is 84% in suburbs, 75% in urban areas, and 71% in rural areas.

There is also a difference by age. 87% of those between 30 and 49 have broadband, while only 70% of those over 65 have a subscription. Surprisingly, only 71% of those between 18 and 29 have broadband, which is down from 78% from a survey released in 2023, but about the same as a survey from 2021. It’s hard to know if this represents a trend such as a migration to cellphones, or if this is a group that changes a lot based on factors like jobs and the economy.

For those that love statistics, Pew has a separate report that trends these results over time.

Smartphone Usage

According to the Pew Survey, 16% of adults are “smartphone dependent”. Meaning they rely on a smartphone for broadband access and don’t subscribe to home broadband. When added to those with a home broadband subscription, 94% of adults subscribe to some form of broadband.

Smartphone usage also varies by income, in relationships that are the opposite of home broadband subscriptions. 27% of those living in homes with incomes under $30,000 reach the Internet only through a smartphone, while only 4% of those with household incomes over $100,000 rely completely on a smartphone.

The same relationship to home broadband applies when looking at age. 27% of those between 18 and 29 only reach the Internet through a smartphone, while only 11% of those between 30 and 39 do so.

Pew notes that the percentage of those who rely on a smartphone only to reach the Internet has doubled from 8% in 2013.

Unending Broadband Growth

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 new 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 goals between 3 and 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.

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 never have believed a decade ago. However, the size of backbone connections is not based on overall broadband consumption but on the busy hour consumption – the time of the day when an ISP’s network is the busiest. Many small ISPs tell 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 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 pay a premium price to get the faster speed.

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.

Will Broadband Go Wireless?

For years it’s been impossible to go to any industry forum without meeting a few folks who predict that residential broadband will go wireless. This buzz has accelerated with the exaggerated claims that fast 5G broadband is right around the corner. I’ve seen even more talk about this due to a recent Pew poll that shows that the number of people that only use their cellphones for data has climbed significantly over the last few years – I’m going to discuss that poll in another upcoming blog.

The question I’m asking today is if it’s possible that most residential broadband usage in the country can go wireless. Like I usually do I looked around the web to try to define the current aggregate amount of landline and cellular data currently being used in the US. It’s a slippery number to get a grasp of for a number of reasons, not the least being that broadband usage is growing rapidly for both cellphones and landline connections. It looks like landline data usage per household is still doubling about every three years; it looks like cellphone data usage is doubling every two years.

OpenVault recently reported that the average monthly household broadband usage has grown to 273.5 gigabytes for the first quarter of this year, up from 215.4 gigabytes a year earlier in 2018 – a growth rate of 27% which almost exactly doubles usage in three years if sustained.

There are currently a little more than 127 million households, and the FCC says that around 85% of all households have broadband. Extrapolating that all out means that US landline networks in aggregate carried almost 30 exabytes of broadband for households monthly in the first quarter of this year. (An exabyte is 1 million terabytes, or 1 billion gigabytes).

I’ve seen a few recent statistics that says that about 77% of Americans now have a smartphone, up from 67% in 2017. Recent statistics from several sources say that the average data usage per smartphone is now over 4 gigabytes per month, with buyers of ‘unlimited’ data plans averaging more than 6 gigabytes per month and others still down closer to 1 gigabyte per month. With a current population around 329 million and using an average of 4 gigabytes per month per residential phone, the cellular networks are currently carrying about 1 exabyte of residential broadband per month.

If we extrapolate forward six years, assuming keeping the existing growth rate for each kind of broadband, we can predict that total monthly US residential broadband usage will be something like the table below. Note that these figures exclude business broadband usage.

:

Monthly Exabytes
Landline Cellular
2019 30 1.0
2020 38 1.4
2021 48 2.0
2022 61 2.9
2023 78 4.2
2024 99 6.0

Today the landline residential broadband networks are carrying 29 exabytes more of data per month than cellular. Within six years that difference grows to 93 exabytes. There is no reasonable path forward that will have cellular data usage overtake residential usage in our lifetime.

The next issue to address is the overall capacity of the cellular network. The engineers at the cellular networks are likely cringing at the possibility of having to carry 6 exabytes of cellular data per month in six years – a 600% increase over today. The cellular companies are going to be increasing data capacity in three ways – adding small cells, adding more mid-range spectrum, and adding 5G efficiency captured mostly through frequency slicing. It’s going to take all of those upgrades just to keep up with the growth in the above chart.

There are those who say that the way the cellular companies will handle future growth is through millimeter wave spectrum. However, that technology will require a fiber-fed small cell site near to every home. We really need to stop referring to millimeter wave spectrum as 5G wireless and instead call it what it is – fiber-to-the curb. When thought of that way, it’s easy to realize that there are no carriers likely to make the investment to deploy that much fiber along every residential street in America. Wireless 5G fiber-to-the-curb is not coming to most neighborhoods. The bottom line is that the world is not going to go wireless, and anybody saying so is engaging in hyperbole and not reality.