Tag Archives: OpenVault

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.

Growing Broadband Demand

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.

The Demand for Broadband Usage

My last blog looked at the long-term trajectory of broadband speed. It’s clear that the historical growth of broadband speeds has been at a continuous growth rate of 21% per year – which equates to a 100-fold increase over the last 25 years. Today’s blog looks at the trajectory of demand for broadband usage.

Consider the following statistics that come from OpenVault showing the nationwide average amount of monthly broadband consumed by businesses and residences over the past five years. These numbers combine download and upload usage.

Admittedly, the growth in 2020 was extraordinary due to the pandemic. But there is no question, just like with the bandwidth speeds, that broadband usage has been growing for both homes and businesses. For the last five years, business broadband usage grew by 311% (25.5% per year), and home broadband usage grew by 236% (18.8% per year).

The challenge of looking into the future is predicting the future growth rate of usage demand. The following table looks at two different growth rates. The first two columns assume that future growth is at the same rate of growth from 2022 to 2023 – 11.7% for businesses and 9.4% for residences. The second set of columns looks at a 12.5% growth rate. This table might be one of the best ways to show the incredible impact of compound growth over many years. The residential growth rate of 12.5% is only 33% larger than the 9.4% growth rate, but over 25 years the higher growth rate more than doubles the predicted future demand.

To be conservative, I’ll use the growth from the first two columns in my additional analysis below. But even those growth rates show a 16-time increase in average business usage and a 9-time increase in average residential usage over 25 years. Most folks probably buy the story that in a decade, the average business will use a terabyte of data per month while the average home will use 1.6 terabytes. However, I suspect most people are uncomfortable with a prediction that homes and businesses will use over 5 terabytes per month in 25 years – due to the difficulty of grasping the impact of compound growth.

What do these numbers mean in terms of the amount of bandwidth that our networks have to carry? The following table applies the predicted broadband usage to the number of homes and businesses in the country. The 2018 and 2023 count of homes and businesses comes from the Federal Reserve, and I’ve predicted future homes and businesses on a straight-line growth.

For those not familiar with the term exabytes, the calculation of 90.5 exabytes in 2023 starts with the number of monthly gigabytes being used nationwide, as shown below. Each successive measurement in the table below reflects a difference factor of 1,024. For example, 1 terabyte equals 1,024 gigabytes. The 90.5 exabytes for 2023 could also be stated as:

 

 

 

The table above predicts an overall 12-fold increase in broadband usage over 25 years. Don’t forget that these numbers only come from residential and business broadband usage. There are a lot more sources of broadband, which means that usage on networks will be higher than shown in the table above. Not included in that table are things like data generated from mobile devices, data generated by governments and universities, data generated by outdoor sensors and farming, data generated by self-driving cars and robots, data used to monitor and operate the electric grid and green energy production, and data used to monitor and operate broadband networks. There is good evidence that these other uses of broadband are growing faster than home and business use.

We understand the factors that have contributed to the growth in broadband over the last five years. This includes things like the following:

  • Most of the software that homes and business use is now located in the cloud. A good example is the Microsoft Office suite of software. Five years ago, users ran Excel, Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint on software loaded in home and business computers. Today, the majority this software operates in the cloud – meaning the computing is done in Microsoft data centers using a broadband connection.
  • The delivery of online news and similar content has largely migrated to video.
  • A huge percentage of homes and businesses have Internet-connected devices that connect to the cloud. This can be a wide range of devices like computers, tablets, smartphones, TVs, appliances, gaming consoles, burglar alarms, cameras, smoke detectors, etc. A recent survey by Parks Associates reports that the average U.S. home has 17 connected devices. These devices connect to and communicate with the cloud without active intervention from users. This is what is defined as machine-to-machine traffic, meaning devices talk directly to the cloud, and is the fastest growing segment of broadband usage.
  • 30 million homes cut the cord and dropped traditional cable TV in the last five years. These homes now get all video entertainment from online sources. Additionally, the quality of the video has increased significantly as video quality has increased from standard definition, to high definition, to 4K.
  • Other entertainment markets like gaming have moved to the cloud.

Nobody has a crystal ball that can predict how we’ll use broadband 25 years from now. We’re always on the verge of new uses that consume more bandwidth. The migration to high-quality video continues, with web services starting to use 8K video. Spatial computing from devices like the Apple Vision Pro shows the potential for combining virtual and augmented reality with the real world. Probably the biggest change to bandwidth on the immediate horizon is the use of AI throughout the economy.

But it seems inevitable that the demand for broadband usage will continue to grow. It’s hard to imagine a world where the growth in demand would stop. Using a conservative growth rate for broadband demand would increase overall broadband usage by 12- to 15-fold over the next 25 years. It’s not hard to imagine new technologies that could double that future predicted demand.

A New Definition of Broadband

The FCC finally increased the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps. The change was too long in coming. This should have been done when Ajit Pai headed the FCC, but politics got in the way. It should have happened when Congress set the definition to 100/20 Mbps in the BEAD grant rules over two years ago – but again, politics interfered.

Coming four or five years too late, the 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is not only not forward-looking, the new definition of broadband is out of sync with the market. Consider the following table that comes from OpenVault that shows how broadband subscriptions have changed in the country since before the pandemic.

Dec 2019 Dec 2024
Under 50 Mbps 22%  6%
50 – 99 Mbps 24%  4%
100 – 199 Mbps 37% 16%
200 – 499 Mbps 11% 34%
500 – 999 Mbps  4%  7%
1 Gbps  3% 33%

Just before the pandemic, 46% of households were subscribing to speeds under 100 Mbps. Today, only 10% of households buy slower speeds – and many of them are likely in rural areas where they have no other option. The numbers have flipped since the pandemic and 40% of households are now subscribing to speeds of 500 Mbps or faster.

Every time I write a blog about broadband speeds, a few ISPs will respond, saying that people don’t need faster broadband. The first time I heard that sentiment was a unified response from the CEO of every big cable company, who said the same thing when Google upset the market by introducing gigabit broadband. The reality is that it doesn’t matter what people need – what matters is what they are willing to buy. The table above shows that people want to buy faster broadband when given the option. I look at that table, and it’s hard to conclude anything other than the public broadband is something faster than 200 Mbps.

What’s missing in the above chart is any recognition of the importance of upload broadband speeds. I think many consumers who upgrade to faster speeds do so because of issues with upload speeds. Serious gamers and folks who work from home with large data files will tell you that the new 20 Mbps definition of upload broadband is massively obsolete.

Unfortunately, the definition of broadband has political and financial overtones. It determines where grant money can be spent. Upping the definition of broadband also has market consequences. Any ISP that is offering speeds less than 100/20 Mbps today is no longer selling broadband. They might as well be selling dial-up, because even the slow-to-change FCC says that what they are selling is obsolete and is something other than broadband.

It’s hard to say if changing the definition of broadband has any practical impact. It’s possible that this kind of announcement will filter down through the public and cause folks buying slower connections to search for something faster.

The natural question is, what’s the next step in defining broadband? My bet is that the FCC is going to rest on its laurels for a while after finally getting through the politics and making this change. It took nine years to move the definition from 25/3 to 100/20 Mbps. Hopefully, the FCC won’t wait another nine years. Congress already said that 100/20 Mbps is obsolete when it said that federal broadband grants ought to be spent to build gigabit networks. The OpenVault table above says that the public’s desire for gigabit broadband is already here today.

Is There Pent-up Upload Demand?

I was recently asked an interesting question, “It’s easy to understand the growth in download bandwidth due to people streaming higher quality video and similar uses. Why do you think upload broadband usage is growing even faster?”

I first had to check to see if upload bandwidth usage is growing faster than download usage – and it is growing a little faster. According to OpenVault, average upload usage has increased 290% since 2019, while average download usage has increased by 270%. From 2022 to 2023, average upload bandwidth usage increased by 13.3%, while download usage increased by 9.3%. Average U.S. upload usage surpassed 40 gigabytes per customer per month at the end of 2023.

There are some obvious reasons why upload bandwidth usage has been growing. Compared to before the pandemic, Zoom and other video calls have become common. There is now a substantial percentage of people who work from home. Several studies I’ve seen and surveys we’ve conducted show that over 30% of homes have somebody who works at home at least part of each week – with many folks now working from home full time.

Much of the software that we use has migrated to the cloud, and that means folks routinely save documents and spreadsheets online when they work from home. Machine-to-machine language, where our computers and smart devices automatically contact websites is one of the fastest subsets of data usage. We’re using a lot more security cameras. Gaming has moved to the cloud.

But as I’ve been thinking about upload usage, I also think there has been a lot of pent-up demand that is getting slowly resolved as ISPs improve upload speeds. I talk to people about their home bandwidth a lot, and I realized that I probably know a dozen people who have told me that they have to ration upload broadband.

To give one of the more extreme examples, I have a friend in a household with two adults working at home and two older children who often game during the daytime. My friend has to routinely join web video session by cellphone because the home broadband can’t support an additional upload link. You might suppose this home is using a slow technology, but they’ve bought the fastest speed available from a major cable company. The upload bandwidth is just not enough to satisfy this home. If the cable companies upgrades the upload speed, or if fiber becomes available, this home is going to see a big spike in upload usage when family members are no longer blocked. They are routinely using all of the upload bandwidth available today but want to use a lot more.

It turns out that I know a lot of people who routinely have trouble connecting to video calls, and they talk about rationing upload speed. That’s one of the interesting things about this – folks who don’t have enough upload speed are fully aware of the situation. They routinely ask who else in the family is online before connecting. They ask other family members to cut back on usage when they need to make an important connection. It’s classic rationing behavior.

Businesses have this problem to an even greater extent than households. In a lot of communities, businesses are offered the same broadband packages that are sold to homes (but at a much higher price). Many businesses use upload bandwidth far more heavily than homes. They might use VoIP for multiple phone lines. They often want to have multiple people streaming at the same time. A huge percentage of business software and functions use cloud software that needs a constant upload path. Many businesses routinely open a VPN to connect with a distance corporate server. Many of the businesses we interview are acutely aware of the constraints placed on them by inadequate upload speeds.

We’re seeing ISPs bringing faster upload speeds, and this will ease a lot of these problems. Cable companies are upgrading upload speeds in some markets using mid-split upgrades or upgrading to early versions of DOCSIS 4.0. A lot of fiber is being built that offers symmetrical broadband speeds. The upcoming rural broadband grants are going to displace a lot of older and slower technology. As pent-up upload demand is resolved, we should continue to see average upload usage growing faster than download usage over the next few years.

Another New High for Broadband Usage

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of 2023. As usual, OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

I think one of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage for customers in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average U.S. average broadband usage since 2018. These numbers include combined download and upload usage.

Average broadband usage stayed at an annual pace of growth of 9% annually. The average U.S. broadband customer used 54.3 more gigabytes per month than a year earlier. That alone is a pretty amazing statistic – 54 gigabytes is a lot of usage in a month. With roughly 120 million broadband subscribers, this equates to over 6.5 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than just a year ago.

Another fascinating chart is below that shows the percentage of homes subscribed to various tiers of broadband speeds. There has been a huge shift in customers subscribing to faster speed tiers. A substantial part of this change was initiated by ISPs that unilaterally bumped customers to faster speeds. But over and above that trend, a huge number of households have opted to buy the faster speed tiers, as witnessed by the 11-fold increase in gigabit subscribers in just five years.

Open Vault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • The average upload usage per household grew to just over 40 gigabytes per month – up from 15 gigabytes at the end of 2019.
  • 6% of homes now use over a terabyte of data per month.
  • Median household broadband usage is 423.7 gigabytes – half of homes use more broadband than the median, and half use less.
  • OpenVault showed the differences between residents and businesses for the first time. The average residence used 652 GB at the end of 2023, while the average business customer used 345 GB.

3Q 2023 Household Broadband Usage

OpenVault just published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the third quarter of 2023. As usual, OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

I think one of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average household usage of broadband in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average U.S. household broadband usage since 2019. These numbers include combined download and upload usage.

Monthly
Gigabytes
3rd Quarter 2019 275.1
3rd Quarter 2020 383.8
3rd Quarter 2021 433.5
3rd Quarter 2022 495.5
3rd Quarter 2023 550.2

We are getting so used to seeing these kinds of statistics that we forget to put increased usage into context. In the third quarter of this year, the average U.S. household used 54.7 more gigabytes of data than one year earlier. That alone is a pretty amazing statistic – 54 gigabytes is a lot of usage in a month. With roughly 120 million residential broadband subscribers, this equates to over 6.5 billion more gigabytes of data used each month than just a year ago. That’s 11% more usage hitting the Internet backbones, just from residential usage.

The following graph shows the average usage of household broadband by quarter, since the beginning of 2019. The overall growth curve has held steady since early 2019.

Open Vault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • The average upload usage per household is 35.9 gigabytes per month. Most homes don’t realize how much data they upload into the cloud every month.
  • Median household broadband usage is 364 gigabytes, up 12.3% from 2022. Half of homes use more than the median, and half use less broadband.
  • OpenVault says the U.S. average download speed is 498 Mbps, and the average upload is 28 Mbps. This is additional proof that the FCC’s proposed 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is already behind the market.

FCC Considers New Definition of Broadband

On November 1, the FCC released a Notice of Inquiry that asks about various topics related to broadband deployment. One of the first questions asked is if the definition of broadband should be increased to 100/20 Mbps. I’ve written about this topic so many times over the years that writing this blog almost feels like déjà vu. Suffice it to say that the current FCC with a newly installed fifth Commissioner finally wants to increase the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps.

The NOI asks if that definition is sufficient for the way people use broadband today. Of most interest to me is the discussion of the proposed 20 Mbps definition of upload speed. Anybody who follows the industry knows that the use of 20 Mbps to define upload speeds is a political compromise that is not based upon anything other than extreme lobbying by the cable industry to not set the number higher. The NOI cites studies that say that 20 Mbps is not sufficient for households with multiple broadband users, yet the FCC still proposes to set the definition at 20 Mbps.

There are some other interesting questions being asked by the NOI. The FCC asks if it should rely on its new BDC broadband maps to assess the state of broadband – as if they have an option. The answer to anybody who digs deep into the mapping data is a resounding no, since there are still huge numbers of locations where speeds claimed in the FCC mapping are a lot higher than what is being delivered. The decision by the FCC to allow ISPs to report marketing speeds doomed the maps to be an ISP marketing tool rather than any accurate way to measure broadband deployment. It’s not hard to predict a time in a few years when huge numbers of people start complaining about being missed by the BEAD grants because of the inaccurate maps. But the FCC has little choice but to stick with the maps it has heavily invested it.

The NOI asks if the FCC should set a longer-term goal for future broadband speeds, like 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. This ignores the more relevant question about the next change in definition that should come after 100/20 Mbps. According to OpenVault, over 80% of U.S. homes already subscribe to download speeds of 200 Mbps or faster, and that suggests that 100 Mbps download is already behind the market. The NOI should be discussing when the definition ought to be increased to 200 or 300 Mbps download instead of a theoretical future definition change.

Setting a future theoretical speed goal is a feel-good exercise to make it sound like FCC policy will somehow influence the forward march of technology upgrades. This is exactly the sort of thing that talking-head policy folks do when they create 5-year and 10-year broadband plans. But I find it impossible to contemplate that the FCC will change the definition of broadband to gigabit speeds in the next decade, because doing so would be saying that every home that doesn’t have a gigabit option would not have broadband. Without that possibility, setting a high target goal is largely meaningless.

The NOI also asks if the FCC should somehow consider latency and packet loss – and the answer is that of course they should. However, they can’t completely punt on the issue like they do today when FCC grants and subsidies only require a latency under 100 milliseconds and set no standards for packet loss. Setting latency requirements that everybody except high-orbit satellites can easily meet is like having no standard at all.

Of interest to rural folks is a long discussion in the NOI about raising the definition of cellular broadband from today’s paltry 5/1 Mbps. Mobile speeds in most cities have download speeds today greater than 150 Mbps, often faster. The NOI suggests that a definition of mobile broadband ought to be something like 35/3 Mbps – something that is far slower than what a urban folks can already receive. But talking about a definition of mobile broadband ignores that any definition of mobile broadband is meaningless in the huge areas of the country where there is practically no mobile broadband coverage.

One of the questions I find most annoying asks if the FCC should measure broadband success by the number of ISPs available at a given location. This is the area where the FCC broadband maps are the most deficient. I wrote a recent blog that highlighted that seven or eight of the ten ISPs that claim coverage at my house aren’t real broadband options. Absolutely nobody is analyzing or challenging the maps for ISPs in cities that claim coverage that is either slower than claimed or doesn’t exist. But it’s good policy fodder for the FCC to claim that many folks in cities have a dozen broadband options. If it were only so.

Probably the most important question asked in the NOI is what the FCC should do about the millions of homes that can’t afford broadband. The FCC asks if it should adopt a universal service goal. This question has activated the lobbyists of the big ISPs who are shouting that the NOI is proof that the FCC wants to regulate and lower broadband rates. The big ISPs don’t even want the FCC to compile and publish data that compares broadband penetration rates to demographic data and household incomes. This NOI is probably not the right forum to ask that question – but solving the affordability gap affects far more households than the rural availability gap.

I think it’s a foregone conclusion that the FCC will use the NOI to adopt 100/20 Mbps as the definition of broadband. After all, the FCC is playing catchup to Congress, which essentially reset the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps two years ago in the BEAD grant legislation. The bigger question is if the FCC will do anything meaningful with the other questions asked in the NOI.

The Growth of Upload Usage

I’ve written a number of blogs about the growth of download broadband usage. I recently looked at the growth trend for upload broadband usage and found that upload usage has been growing faster than download usage.

The statistics in the following table come from OpenVault, which has been tracking broadband usage statistics each quarter. The numbers represent the national average monthly usage of broadband for households at the end of the second quarter of each year until before the pandemic. Just like with download usage, there was a big burst in upload usage at the onset of the pandemic as people were sent home. People instantly needed upload links to communicate back to the office or the school. But even since the pandemic, the overall trend shows upload usage growing faster overall than download usage.

Upload Annual Download Annual
Mbps Growth Mbps Growth
2Q 2019 15 265
2Q 2020 23 56% 357 35%
2Q 2021 28 22% 405 13%
2Q 2022 31 11% 460 14%
2Q 2023 36 15% 498 8%

There are a lot of possible explanations for the growth of upload usage:

  • The pandemic trained the whole country to communicate by video conference. This has grown to become a routine practice. I use video conferencing at least a few hours per day, and often a lot more.
  • Over the last five years, a lot of the routine software we use migrated to the cloud. As a common example, Microsoft Office 365 has migrated the Microsoft suite of products to store and save in the cloud. Opening or modifying spreadsheets, Word Documents, or PowerPoints now uses upload bandwidth.
  • There is also widespread use today of collaboration software where multiple people can work on documents, spreadsheets, and graphics at the same time.
  • It’s hard to imagine anybody with a lot of files that doesn’t back them up in Dropbox or the many other storage systems.
  • There is a lot of hidden machine-to-machine traffic where software automatically and routinely connects to the outside world. A few years ago, a Washington Post reporter left his computer running during a month-long vacation and found that his home had generated almost a gigabyte of upload traffic in his absence.
  • It’s now a video-driven world, and people share videos as easily as we used to share pictures.
  • A major portion of gaming has moved to the cloud.
  • We are using a lot more security cameras. There has been a proliferation of doorbell cameras installed as well as inside cameras to check on pets, kids, and babysitters. People routinely check the cameras remotely.

It seems unlikely that upload usage will ever catch up to download usage for most homes. Most people consume more video and other content than they generate. But the volume of average upload usage is still significant. I doubt that anybody a decade ago would have predicted that the average U.S. home would be uploading 36 gigabytes each month.

There doesn’t seem to be any reason on the horizon why the growth won’t continue. More people are sharing videos and other content. We’re slowly creeping towards having early versions of telepresence and virtual reality, which will likely mean a huge bump up in upload usage for many homes. Does anybody care to make a prediction of the average amount of upload usage a decade from now?

Broadband Speed 2Q 2023

OpenVault just published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the second quarter of 2023. As usual, OpenVault is documenting the continued growth in broadband usage by U.S. households.

I think one of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average household usage of broadband in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average U.S. household broadband usage since 2019. These numbers include combined download and upload usage.

Monthly
Gigabytes
2nd Quarter 2019 280.0
2nd Quarter 2020 380.2
2nd Quarter 2021 433.5
2nd Quarter 2022 490.7
2nd Quarter 2023 533.8

The following graph shows the usage of household average broadband usage since the beginning of 2019. This chart shows the second quarter usage (measured at the end of June) is always the lowest quarter each year, with the highest usage at the end of the fourth quarter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anybody who predicted these levels of average household usage levels twenty years ago would have been laughed out of the industry. Twenty years ago, the cutting-edge broadband products were DSL and cable modems that delivered speeds of around 6 Mbps download and barely any upload. We’re now at a place where the average home uses over half a terabyte of data each month.

OpenVault classifies households that use more than 1 terabyte of data per month as power users. 15.6% of all U.S. homes are now in the power user category. The average usage for power user homes is 2.21 terabytes per month, which is almost six times higher than the average non-power user household. If you’re wondering how power users use so much data, the average power user consumes 500 gigabytes of data per month just for gaming and almost 300 gigabytes for social media.

As usual, the report is full of other interesting statistics:

  • Homes that are subscribed to the FCC’s ACP (Affordable Connectivity Plan) use more data than other homes. Homes where the ACP subsidy covers the entire broadband bill use 18% more data than non-ACP homes . Homes where part of the bill is covered by ACP use almost 41% more broadband than non-ACP homes.
  • The migration to faster broadband plans continues, and only 10.4% of all U.S. broadband subscribers are buying a plan with an advertised speed of less than 100 Mbps. 75% of U.S. homes now subscribe to download speeds of 200 Mbps or faster.
  • Upload usage continues to grow, and the average home now uploads 36.1 gigabytes of data per month – another number that was inconceivable even a decade ago.