Tag Archives: Upload Speeds

Broadband Usage in 4Q 2025

OpenVault recently published its Broadband Insights Report for the end of the fourth quarter of 2025. One of the most useful statistics from OpenVault is the average monthly broadband usage per household in gigabytes. Below is the trend in average monthly U.S. download and upload volumes since the third quarter of 2021. These averages include broadband used by residential and small business customers.The average U.S. broadband customer used 59 more downloaded gigabytes and 10 more uploaded gigabits per month than a year earlier. This growth means continued pressure on broadband networks because if we assume roughly 120 million broadband subscribers nationwide, this growth means over 8.3 billion more gigabytes of data cross the Internet than a year earlier.

As can be seen in the table above, upload usage has been growing at a faster pace than download usage. In a recent quarterly report, OpenVault credited the growth of upload usage to the increasing usage of video calls, cloud backup, IoT uplinks, and similar uses. To put the 10-gigabyte increase in average upload into context, it’s the equivalent of every household uploading an additional 7 standard definition movie files or 3 high definition movie files every month compared to a year earlier. I think the average household would be surprised by the volume of data they are uploading each month.

The report made an interesting comparison between HFC technology and fiber for an unnamed cable company. When comparing customers that subscribed to equivalent fast download speeds, the average customer using cable technology uploaded 58 gigabytes, while the average fiber customer uploaded 93 gigabytes. Clearly, the slow upload speeds on cable (an average of 17.3 Mbps) are restricting uploading compared to fiber customers with symmetrical data plans.

Another interesting statistic is the percentage of U.S. subscribers at different speed tiers. For the last several years, there has been a steady migration of subscribers from slower speed tiers to the fastest tiers, and there is continued erosion in customers subscribing to speeds under 100 Mbps. What’s most interesting about the two years is a big jump in subscribers in the 200-499 Mbps tier and a decrease in subscribers buying speeds faster than 500 Mbps. My best guess is that this is reflecting the continued migration of millions of homes to FWA wireless. Those households seem to be willing to accept slower speeds as a trade-off for the lower prices.

One thing this table demonstrates is the absurdity of the FCC’s current definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps. At the end of 2025, 87.4% of U.S. broadband subscribers are buying a product with speeds of 200 Mbps download or faster.

OpenVault always includes other interesting statistics in its quarterly reports:

  • The annual average increase in usage is growing over time. In 2022, households used 50 gigabytes more than the previous year. That’s increased to 54 GB in 2023, 57 GB in 2024, and 69 GB in 2025.
  • Super Power Users (those that use more than 2 terabytes of data per month grew by 22.5% in 2025, to become 7.4% of all households.

Median usage grew from 461.2 GB in 2024 to 531.8 GB in 2025. The median is the number where 50% of customers use less and 50% use more. That’s an increase of 15.3%, which is a faster growth rate than for average usage (9.9%). OpenVault credits the faster increase in median speeds to faster growth than average for customers with smaller monthly usage.

AI Needs Quality Upload Speeds

The pandemic exposed a huge weakness in cable company networks when it became clear that their networks did not have enough upload capacity to support people working and schooling from home. That period when people struggled to work from home might have been the trigger to convince millions of people that fiber was superior to cable technology. The cable companies reacted quickly and goosed upload speeds to the range of 30-40 Mbps. Since then, they have slowly been upgrading to much faster upload speeds using mid-splits and DOCSIS 4.0.

A recent article from Ookla suggests that the same need for faster upload speeds might be coming for cellular networks due to the way that people are starting to use AI in daily life. The article provides some examples of ways we might use AI in the near future. A person might scan a menu in a restaurant, and AI can provide real-time feedback to estimate the calories in each dish or highlight foods that might trigger an allergic reaction. This would require quickly uploading a picture of the menu to provide quick feedback. That’s not a data-intensive transaction, but consider instead using AI to provide real-time feedback to somebody walking around in a foreign city. AI could translate signs and describe the nature of stores or shops as they come into view.

 

U.S. cellular companies have allocated the smallest percentage of bandwidth to upload compared to the major cell providers around the world. AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon have allocated between 6.6% and 7.1% of total bandwidth capacity to upload. In contrast, China Telecom and China Unicom have allocated over 16% of bandwidth to upload.

In writing this blog, I took a speed test on AT&T and got a speed of 381/11 Mbps on my cellphone. I note this is the fastest download speed I’ve ever received on AT&T, by a lot, and shows the impact of the AT&T’s recent introduction of the spectrum acquired from EchoStar. I took several other tests with similar results, and at my house, the upload speeds are only about 3% of total bandwidth.

American cellular carriers seem to be in a race to claim the fastest network for bragging rights, and this has led them to maximize download speeds to an extreme degree. I doubt that many people are complaining except for folks who are trying to stream video from their phone. When I swap my phone over to WiFi, the upload speed in my Charter connection is more than 10 times faster than the AT&T cellular upload connection.

The article points out that carriers have options to boost upload speeds. The one that is discussed the most in the article is to convert cellular networks to dynamic TDD (time division duplexing), which would allow the phone to assign bandwidth available to the phone to either download or upload, according to the immediate need.

But that fix alone wouldn’t solve the problem, because a carrier would need to beef up the entire network in the upload direction to handle larger volumes of uploaded data. There are other interesting limitations. For example, if a carrier uses shared spectrum like CBRS for uploading, then setting a faster upload would have to be coordinated with the other major users of the spectrum to synchronize the network clocks.

The Ookla article also demonstrates that handsets can be a limitation by showing the upload speeds that can be achieved on different generations of Samsung Galaxy phones. with lower upload capability on older phones.

The slow upload speed on my tests might be an anomaly, but before AT&T introduced the new spectrum, my upload speeds were rarely faster than 5 Mbps. Ookla says that median upload speeds in the second half of 2025 were 18 Mbps for AT&T, 21 Mbps for Verizon, and 27 Mbps for T-Mobile – all slow in comparison to fiber and upgraded cable technologies.

Cellular Upload Speeds

T-Mobile recently announced a cellular speed test where the company was able to achieve an upload speed of 550 Mbps on a live cellular link. The test was clearly done in ideal conditions in order to achieve the fast speed, but T-Mobile acknowledges that upload speeds are increasingly important to customers. Fierce Network quoted T-Mobile President of Technology Ulf Ewaldsson as saying, “uplink is the next big thing.”

This is something the broadband industry has known for many years. Fiber companies set a standard of symmetrical download and upload speeds, which frankly provide more upload speed than people need. But the public complained loudly about the slow upload speeds from cable companies during the pandemic, and cable companies have scrambled to increase upload speeds using mid-split upgrades. Cable companies have upgraded many markets to upload speeds of 100 to 200 Mbps.

This new speed test record seems to have been released to complement T-Mobile’s press release in April, where it announced that it now offers the first nationwide 5G Advanced network. By that, T-Mobile means its 5G network has begun to incorporate the latest industry 5G standards included in 3 GPP Release 17 and 18. According to the press release, T-Mobile has implemented 5G Advanced nationwide, although there is some discussion in the Fierce Network article saying that is not likely.

There is no doubt that T-Mobile has upgraded networks to a greater degree than the competition, as documented in the latest report from Ookla for the end of 2024 where T-Mobile had a median download speed of 281.5 Mbps, compared to 199.1 Mbps for Verizon and 140.1 for AT&T.  However, during that same period, T-Mobile’s median upload speed, as measured by Ookla, was much slower at 21.3 Mbps. In the April press release, T-Mobile said its typical upload speeds are between 6 and 31 Mbps.

Upload speeds likely matter a lot more to T-Mobile now that it has passed the 6 million customer mark with its FWA home broadband product. Folks who use broadband for gaming, working from home, online schooling, and conferencing are not going to be enamored with a broadband product where poor upload speeds can degrade performance. The current median speed of 21 Mbps is basically the same as the speed customers don’t like on cable company networks.

Upload speeds are probably the biggest long-term weakness of FWA broadband. FWA customers who live in rural areas might not have another alternative other than Starlink, which also has slow upload speeds. But a lot of FWA’s growth is coming from suburbs and cities where customers have a broadband alternative. Cable companies are scrambling to get much faster upload speeds, and fiber generally has symmetrical speeds. Ookla points out in its latest quarterly report that upload usage is growing at a much faster pace than download usage. T-Mobile is being smart in looking at a way to improve upload speeds.

How the Pandemic Changed Broadband

The Washington Post recently published an article with a series of graphs that shows the impact of the pandemic on a number of economic indicators that range from unemployment, wages, air travel, grocery prices, home prices, and consumer sentiment.

The article got me thinking about the impact of the pandemic on the broadband industry – and there are several important changes that came out of our collective pandemic experience.

Upload Speeds. Probably the biggest change for the industry was that many millions of people suddenly cared about upload speeds as people tried to work from home and students tried to attend class from home. There have always been people who complained about the ability to join a Zoom call, but before the pandemic, ISPs largely ignored them.

The pandemic turned the lack of upload speeds into a crisis. It turns out that upload speeds weren’t just a problem for slow technologies like DSL and hotspots. Cable companies suddenly had a lot of irate customers who were furious that they couldn’t maintain upload connections from home. Cable companies had put a lot of effort over the previous decade into staying ahead of download speed demand. Before customers began complaining about download speeds, cable companies had regularly made unilateral upgrades to download speeds. Every few years, customers would wake up to suddenly faster speeds, and surveys showed that most cable broadband customers were happy with download speeds from cable companies.

But the pandemic suddenly meant that cable technology was seen as inadequate. It was the collective experience of customers during the pandemic that led to the public becoming convinced that fiber is a better technology and that their cable company was behind the times. This prompted the cable companies to scramble to find a faster upload solution, and we’re just now seeing them implement faster upload speeds four years after the start of the pandemic. Only time will tell if current upload speed upgrades will be good enough to turn around the public sentiment that now favors fiber over coax.

Working at Home. The pandemic sent huge number of people home to work, and many of them have never gone back to the office. My consulting firm does surveys, and before the pandemic we rarely saw more than 10% of homes that had somebody working from home even part time. Today, we routinely find communities where 15% or more of homes have somebody working at home full time, and 50% of home have somebody working from home part time.

The main impact for ISPs of having customers working from home is that it created a lot of customers who are intolerant of broadband outages. People who work from home typically lose the ability to work during the outage, and ISPs get instant feedback about outages through complaints and negative online reviews. Our surveys show that intolerance from outages has climbed significantly since before the pandemic. Many customers believe broadband should always work.

Outrage over Lack of Rural Broadband. I’ve been working with rural communities that have been yelling for more than a decade about the problems caused by poor broadband. The pandemic brought this issue to national attention when employers and schools in cities and county seats couldn’t send people home for school or work. There was so much press about the issue that I think this was the first time that a lot of urban and suburban people realized that rural folks don’t have the same broadband.

I firmly believe that the outcry about the impact of the pandemic is what got the BEAD grants put into the IIJA legislation at such a high level of funding. Before the pandemic, the federal government and states would throw a billion dollars or so each year at fixing rural broadband – I used to call this the hundred-year plan to solve rural broadband. It took the pandemic to get bigger dollars thrown at the rural broadband gap. I don’t know if anybody has added up all of the funding, but between state, federal, and local grants, we must be spending nearly $100 billion for new rural broadband networks.

Cable Companies Tout Speed Increases

Earlier this month, NCTA – The Internet and Television Association – posted an article on its website touting the big increases in broadband speeds since the start of the pandemic. NCTA is the industry trade and lobbying association for medium-sized and large cable companies.

The article touts that the average U.S. download speed has grown from 138 Mbps in March 2020, the first month of the pandemic, to 226 Mbps in June 2022. These speeds come from the Ookla Speedtest Global Index. The cited numbers are the mean, or the average speeds measured by Ookla in the respective months across the whole U.S. Obviously, the cable companies are taking credit for much of the speed increase, and to some extent, that’s true. But there are a number of different reasons why average download speeds are increasing.

One of the primary reasons is directly related to the cable companies. Over the last year, cable companies have almost universally increased the download speed of the base broadband product to 200 Mbps to 300 Mbps. This not only applies to new customers, but many existing customers woke up one day in the last year with a download speed increase. This is something that the cable companies had done periodically since the days when speeds were 6 Mbps download. Since Comcast and Charter alone serve over half of all broadband customers in the country, anything the big cable companies do to increase speeds affects a lot of people and drives up the national average speed.

Another factor that is driving up average speeds is more homes getting access to fiber. This is starting to rachet up and many homes are now seeing a second fast choice other than the cable company. When looking at the amount of fiber being built and the sales goals of the fiber companies, this is going to be picking up in the coming years. To some extent, the big cable companies are also building fiber. Charter, in particular, is building fiber on the fringe of its traditional cable markets to new subdivisions or areas where the company has gotten grants. I’ve been hearing from Charter cable customers lately who are frustrated that the company is building fiber nearby and not in their neighborhood.

One of the major reasons for the average speed increases reflects poorly on the cable companies. Over the last two years, there has been a huge migration of homes buying faster broadband packages. These are homes that struggled with broadband performance and upgraded to get better speeds. Most people didn’t realize (and still may not realize) that their issues during the pandemic were mostly due to poor upload bandwidth from the cable companies. Folks upgraded to faster download packages hoping to get better upload performance, and even after the upgrade, many did not. You’ll notice on the NCTA website that there is no mention of upload bandwidth – a topic the cable companies absolutely do not want to discuss.

A final factor that is contributing to a faster national average download speed is the rapid expansion of fiber in rural areas. While this doesn’t represent a big slice of people, the national average speeds are boosted when households migrate from download speeds of 1 or 2 Mbps to fast download speeds on fiber. There is currently a lot of construction going on funded by the FCC’s ACAM program, federal grants and subsidies like ReConnect and RDOF, and numerous state broadband grants.

So yes, the cable companies deserve credit for increasing download speeds – and they are a big part of the reason behind the faster national average speeds. But it’s not all due to the cable companies.

Grants and Upload Speeds

The NTIA set a new definition of broadband at 100/20 Mbps for purposes of the BEAD grants – if a customer fails that test they are considered either unserved or underserved. Everybody nationwide has been so focused on download speeds that we are largely ignoring the fact that a huge number of nationwide broadband customers are not getting upload speeds of 20 Mbps. All of the speed test efforts I’ve seen have focused on whether homes and businesses are receiving 100 Mbps download and have largely ignored any implications of customers not achieving the NTIA’s 20 Mbps upload stream to qualify for a broadband grant.

My consulting firm helps clients conduct a lot of speed tests, and I also have been poring through the large number of speed tests gathered by Ookla and MLabs. I mostly work in rural counties, county seats, and suburban cities. I would venture to say that the vast majority of speed tests we see from cable customers do not meet the upload speed. The same is true for a large percentage of WISPs.

Sometimes the evidence is overwhelming. I recently worked with a county seat of about 20,000 people and the only customer in the community seeing upload speeds of 20 Mbps or faster were those who subscribed to the cable company’s gigabit product. Not one other cable customer had a 20 Mbps, and most weren’t even close, with an average of 11 Mbps. This was true for customers buying both a 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, and 400 Mbps download product.

This raises an interesting question, which I’m sure is going to be the core of the cable company’s response to this question. In that particular city, the gigabit customers were getting upload speeds between 30 Mbps and 40 Mbps. I’m sure the cable company will argue that since a few customers are getting speeds over 20 Mbps that the network is capable of faster speeds.

I’ve talked to several knowledgeable engineers on the topic, and they tell me that the cable company in this case could not give faster speeds to everybody – or they would. The cable company is somehow giving a preference for gigabit customers at the expense of everybody else. If the cable operator opened the gates for everybody to get the fastest upload speed possible, the likely outcome would be that the gigabit customer speeds would drop to match everybody else’s speeds – the other customers would not get any faster.

This is an interesting question for state broadband grant offices to consider because it’s inevitable that people are going to seek grants where there is a cable company operating, using the argument that the cable company doesn’t meet the NTIA’s definition of broadband.

It makes sense to me that an ISP must meet both components of the speed definition to be considered as served. It shouldn’t matter if an ISP misses on the download or upload speed – if it fails one of the two benchmarks, it is not meeting the NTIA’s definition of served. If you don’t believe that logic, consider an ISP that is delivering 50/20 Mbps on licensed fixed wireless. I think there would be a consensus that this customer is not served since it is achieving only half of the definition of download speeds. But isn’t the same true for an ISP that is delivering 120/10 Mbps broadband?

To be fair to cable companies, they deliver speeds greater than 20 Mbps in many markets. I buy 400 Mbps download from Charter and routinely see upload speeds of 30 Mbps. But we all know that the performance of cable companies varies widely from town to town, and often inside of a town.

I had to laugh last year when the big cable companies fought so hard to reduce the definition of served from 100/100 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps. I knew then that this battle would be coming since the majority of cable customers, at least in the markets I have studied, are not seeing upload speeds of 20 Mbps.

One thing I think we can all count on is that if any grant office awards funding to overbuild a cable company because of this issue, we’re going to see the cable industry go ape. They’ve been quiet about the poor upload speeds, but they won’t stay that way if they see grant money coming to overbuild them.

What We’ve Learned About Upload Bandwidth

Until the pandemic hit, I rarely thought about upload bandwidth. I mostly used upload bandwidth to send files to people, and I rarely cared if they received the files immediately – I was happy as long as files got sent. But the pandemic changed everything for millions of people. All of a sudden, homes were unable to function well due to problems with uploading.

The big change from the pandemic came when many millions of people were sent home to work while students were sent home to attend school remotely. It turns out that connecting to schools and offices requires steady and reliable upload bandwidth, and many homes found they didn’t have that. My consulting firm has done several surveys per month during the pandemic, and we routinely have seen that at least 30% of those working or schooling from home, including those using cable company broadband, say that their bandwidth was not adequate for the needs created by the pandemic. Homes that tried to accommodate multiple people working online at the same time had the worst experiences.

We also changed a lot of other behavior during the pandemic that uses more upload bandwidth. Many who work from home started using software that automatically saves all work in the cloud. We started using collaborative software to connect to others working from home. And we began making Zoom calls to such an extent that this is now the largest use of upload broadband nationwide and has grown from practically nothing to consume over 15% of all upload broadband usage. Spending more time at home led millions to take up gaming – an activity that just started transitioning to the cloud before the pandemic.

We also got a stark reminder that broadband technologies are shared services. We saw that even homes with only one person working at home could suffer if the bandwidth for the whole neighborhood got bogged down from overuse.

It seems that everybody started collecting speed tests to figure out what was going wrong. Local governments, States, and the NTIA started gathering and looking at speed test results. We know that an individual speed test result is not reliable, but we’ve seen that masses of speed tests tell a great story about a given ISP in a given community.

We also learned that broadband networks vary by neighborhood – something that I don’t recall ever being discussed before the pandemic. Speed tests often showed that the performance of a cable company in a city could be drastically different by neighborhood. There have always been those who complained about cable company broadband, but they weren’t taken seriously by those in the same town that had adequate broadband. But we now often see some parts of cities with speeds drastically lower than the rest of the city – something cable companies have known about but never fixed.

We learned how awful rural broadband technologies can be when most rural folks had problems working and schooling from home. We figured this out when speed tests showed that rural upload speeds are often less than 1 Mbps.

Lately, I’ve been learning more about jitter, which measures the variance in broadband signal strength. Many people learned about jitter the hard way when they often got booted from school connections or Zoom calls when broadband signal strength fluctuated and hit a low point.

We also learned how the cable companies use the worst spectrum on a cable system to transmit upload speeds. They use spectrum inside the coaxial cables to transmit data, and the portion of the network used for upload is where natural interference from microwave ovens, small engines, and natural background radiation causes the most interference.

We’ve also learned that the pandemic has been good for the ISPs, although they aren’t talking about it. Millions of homes upgraded to faster broadband to try to get enough bandwidth during the pandemic. Unfortunately for many of them, their problem was not the download speeds, but the upload speeds, and the upgrade may not have brought much of a solution.

The Upload Speed Lie

In the 2020 Broadband Deployment Report, the FCC made the following claim. “The vast majority of Americans – surpassing 85% – now have access to fixed terrestrial broadband service at 250/25 Mbps”. The FCC makes this claim based upon the data provided to it by the country’s ISPs on Form 477. We know the data reported by the ISPs is badly flawed in the over-reporting of download speeds, but we’ve paid little attention to the second number the FCC cites – the 25 Mbps upload speeds that are supposedly available to everybody. I think the FCC claim that 85% of homes have access to 25 Mbps upload speeds is massively overstated.

The vast majority of the customers covered by the FCC statement are served by cable companies using hybrid fiber-coaxial technology. I don’t believe that cable companies are widely delivering upload speeds greater than 25 Mbps upload. I think the FCC has the story partly right. I think cable companies tell customers that the broadband products they buy have upload speeds of 25 Mbps, and the cable company’s largely report these marketing speeds on Form 477.

But do cable companies really deliver 25 Mbps upload speeds? One of the services my consulting firm provides is helping communities conduct speed tests. We’ve done speed tests in cities recently where only a tiny fraction of customers measured upload speeds greater than 25 Mbps on a cable HFC network.

It’s fairly easy to understand the upload speed capacity of a cable system. The first thing to understand is the upload capacity based upon the way the technology is deployed. Most cable systems deploy upload broadband using the frequencies on the cable system between 5 MHz and 42 MHz. This is a relatively small amount of bandwidth that sits at the noisiest part of cable TV frequency. I remember back to the days of analog broadcast TV and analog cable systems when somebody running a blender or a microwave would disrupt the signals on channels 2 through 5 – the cable companies are now using these same frequencies for uploading broadband. The DOCSIS 3.0 specification assigned upload broadband to the worst part of the spectrum because before the pandemic almost nobody cared about upload broadband speeds.

The second factor affecting upload speeds is the nature of the upload requests from customers. Before the pandemic, the upload link was mostly used to send out attachments to emails or backup data on a computer into the cloud. These are largely temporary uses of the upload link and are also considered non-critical – it didn’t matter to most folks if a file was uploaded in ten seconds or five minutes. However, during the pandemic, all of the new uses for uploading require a steady and dedicated upload data stream. People now are using the upload link to connect to school servers, to connect to work servers, to take college classes online, and to sit on video call services like Zoom. These are critical applications – if the upload broadband is not steady and sufficient the user loses the connection. The new upload applications can’t tolerate best effort – a connection to a school server either works or it doesn’t.

The final big factor that affects the bandwidth on a cable network is demand. Before the pandemic, a user had a better chance than today of hitting 25 Mbps upload because they might have been one of a few people trying to upload at any given time. But today a lot of homes are trying to make upload connections at the same time. This matters because a cable system shares bandwidth both in the home, but also in the neighborhood.

The upload link from a home can get overloaded if more than one person tries to connect to the upload link at the same time. Homes with a poor upload connection will find that a second or a third user cannot establish a connection. The same thing happens at the neighborhood level – if too many homes in a given neighborhood are trying to connect to upload links, then the bandwidth for the whole neighborhood becomes overloaded and starts to fail. Remember a decade ago that it was common for downloaded videos streams to freeze or pixelate in the evening when a lot of homes were using broadband? The cable companies have largely solved the download problem, but now we’re seeing neighborhoods overloading on upload speeds. This results in people unable to establish a connection to a work server or being booted off a Zoom call.

The net result of the overloaded upload links is that the cable companies cannot deliver 25 Mbps to most homes during the times when people are busy on the upload links. The cable companies have ways to fix this – but most fixes mean expensive upgrades. I bet that the cable companies are hoping this problem will magically go away at the end of the pandemic. But I’m guessing that people are going to continue to use upload speeds at levels far higher than before the pandemic. Meanwhile, if the cable companies were being honest, they would not be reporting 25 Mbps upload speeds to the FCC. (Just typing that made me chuckle because it’s not going to happen.)

FCC – Please Focus on Upload Speeds

I wrote a recent blog that talked about how the FCC is recommending to stick with the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband for another year. In that blog, I mostly talked about how 25 Mbps download is out of touch when the FCC claims that 85% of homes today can buy 250/25 Mbps broadband.

Today I want to look at the second half of the definition – the upload speed. The FCC is proposing, in 2020 – the year when millions were sent home for work and school – that 3 Mbps upload is a sufficiently high definition of broadband. Sticking with the 3 Mbps definition of broadband makes no sense. I contend that 3 Mbps is massively out of touch with the needs of the average home. To make matters worse, the FCC will allow an ISP that offers 25/3 broadband to bid in and win grant funding in October’s RDOF grant – a network which the ISP then has six years to build. The FCC doesn’t just think that 25/3 is adequate broadband today, they think that is okay broadband size years from now.

The pandemic has made it clear to a lot of households that upload speeds matter. Before the pandemic, customers that cared about the upload speeds tended to be folks that sent huge files such as doctors, architects, engineers, photographers, etc. When they worked from home these folks have known for years that the upload speeds on the average home network are inadequate.

All of a sudden this year, millions of homes found out that they don’t have enough upload broadband speeds. Consider the amount of bandwidth that is needed to work from home. There are two uses of upload broadband that are new to most people – connecting to a school or work server and participating in Zoom or other online meetings.

Many home and work servers require the creation of a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN is a dedicated connection – the home connects and stays connected to a school or work server. It generally requires dedicating at least 1 Mbps of bandwidth, but usually more, to create and maintain a VPN connection. This means that somebody working at home on a VPN is going to tie up 1 – 3 Mbps of bandwidth that can’t be used for anybody else in the home.

Zoom calls also require upload bandwidth. The Zoom website says that a home should have a 2 Mbps connection, both upload and download to sustain a Zoom session between just two people. The amount of download bandwidth increases with each person connected to the call, meaning Zoom recommends the 2 Mbps upload, but a 6 Mbps download for a meeting with three other people.

There are other uses for upload bandwidth in the home as well. For example, a telemedicine call can use even slightly more bandwidth than connecting to work or school servers. Upload bandwidth is needed for gaming in the cloud. Upload bandwidth is also used to back-up data files, pictures, etc. into the cloud.

It doesn’t take complicated math to see why a 3 Mbps connection is inadequate for any household that wants to make more than one upload-heavy connection to the Internet at the same time. 3 Mbps is not enough bandwidth for multiple people in a home trying to connect to work and school servers or to make Zoom-like calls. I’ve heard from numerous people this year telling me they can’t have more than one person at a time using their home broadband connection. Many of these complaints came from households using broadband provided by the big cable companies, and many of these homes thought they had plenty of bandwidth until the pandemic hit.

For the FCC to stick with 3 Mbps upload as the definition of broadband is a slap in the face to every family where more than one person wants to connect to the web at the same time. With that definition, the FCC is blessing any ISP that delivers 3 Mbps upload speeds.

Even if the FCC doesn’t want to upgrade the download component of the definition of broadband, they can’t turn a blind idea to the millions of homes trying to make it through the pandemic. If social scientists are right, there will likely be millions of people who continue to work remotely even after the end of the pandemic. This is not a temporary problem that is somehow going to go away.

It’s hard to think that the minimum acceptable definition of upload speeds should be anything slower than 25 Mbps. Assuming a robust WiFi network, that’s enough bandwidth for 3 – 4 adults and/or students to work from home at the time. So FCC, please reconsider the definition of upload speeds. If you stick with 3 Mbps upload as the definition of broadband it means you don’t support broadband networks that can deliver the speeds that the average households need.

Can 5G Compete with Cable Broadband?

One of the recurring themes used to promote 5G is that wireless broadband is going to become a serious competitor to wireline broadband. There are two primary types of broadband competition – competition by price or performance. Cable companies have largely won the broadband battle in cities and suburbs and I’ve been thinking about the competition that cable companies might see from 5G.

Cable broadband is an interesting product. In most cities and suburbs today, the basic broadband product has a download speed between 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps with upload speeds in the range of 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps. The cable companies decided over a decade ago that they were going to stay in front of market demand and have periodically increased speeds, with the most recent speed increases introduced around two years ago. Cable systems can offer speeds up to a gigabit, but the ugly secret that cable companies don’t want to talk about is that it would be incredibly expensive if too many people bought and used gigabit speeds. CCG does market surveys and the primary complaints that customers have about urban cable broadband is inconsistency – networks have periodic slowdowns and outages that customers find frustrating. As much as one third of cable customers also poll as hating the customer service of the larger cable companies.

The biggest weakness of cable broadband is the upload speed. This wasn’t an issue for most homes until the recent pandemic sent students and parents home. Many homes that were satisfied with cable broadband have found that the upload streams are inadequate to allow multiple people in a home to connect to servers and video conferencing services. Cable companies can probably tweak upload speeds upward by 50% more, but that will still feel slow to many homes. Cable companies are faced with an expensive upload to DOCSIS 4.0 to create symmetrical speeds.

There are two products being marketed as 5G. The first is Verizon’s fixed wireless access product. This is not 5G and is best described as fiber-to-the-curb, because it requires a fiber network built close to homes to provide this product. This is a fiber technology that happens to use a wireless drop. As such, it is technologically superior to cable broadband in that speeds can be symmetrical. Verizon says speeds can be as fast as a gigabit, but speeds will vary by customer and will likely slow down during heavy rain or get slower in summer when shrubs and trees are in full leaf. From a price perspective, Verizon is using this product to reduce cellular churn and is pricing it at $50 for a Verizon wireless customer and $70 for everybody else.  The $70 price is not going to push Comcast and Charter to lower prices, but it might force them to hesitate with future rate increases for neighborhoods that are competing with the Verizon product.

The FCC and the industry have implied for years that 5G cellular will be a competitor for landline broadband. I still can’t see many homes accepting 5G cellular as a replacement for landline broadband. I can think of a number of important ways to compare and contrast the two broadband products:

Speed. Forget the millimeter-wave product that cellular companies are touting as delivering cellular speeds over a gigabit. It’s a gimmick product used  to try to promote the idea that 5G is fast. The millimeter-wave technology is only good outdoors, and even then only travels a few hundred feet from a cell site. It delivers gigabit speeds to cellphones – when cellphones aren’t designed to run multiple apps that require fast broadband. The 5G download speeds on regular cellphones should creep up 100 Mbps over the next 5 to 7 years, and would rival the base speeds on cable company networks – but by that time the cable companies are likely to upgrade all of their customers to 250 Mbps. Cellular upload speeds don’t matter, because no family is going to conduct multiple upload sessions over a single cellphone.

Overall Capacity. Cellular networks today carry less than 5% of all US broadband. Even the majority of data passed through cellphones is handed off to landline networks through WiFi. In North America this year, Cisco predicts that in 2020 there will be 77 exabytes per month carried by landline networks compared to 3.4 exabytes carried by cellular networks. By 2022 that will grow to 109 exabytes for landline networks and 6 exabytes for cellular networks – the gap between the two technologies is rapidly widening. There is no scenario where cellular networks can somehow steal away a lot of the traffic carried by landlines. When cellular companies make this claim they are arguing against the realities of physics.

Household Usage. Household usage of broadband has exploded. In the first quarter of 2018, the average US home used 215 gigabytes of data per month. At the end of the recent first quarter of 2020 that had grown to over 400 gigabytes per month. By 2024 the average home might be using more than 700 gigabytes per month.

Data Caps. The above statistics show the absurdity of the claim that cellular will somehow overtake landline broadband. Even the ‘unlimited’ cellular data plans today are capped or heavily throttled after 20 or so gigabytes of data used in a month. Cellular companies are not likely to raise the data caps much because they don’t want heavy data users sucking all of the capacity out of the cellular networks.

Pricing. US cellular data is the most expensive broadband in developed countries. For 5G to compete with landline broadband, the cellular companies would have to kill the paradigm of selling an extra gigabyte of data for $10. 5G can only compete with landline broadband if the cellular carriers can increase wireless network capacity by a factor of ten and are willing to lower prices by more than a factor of ten. The first is not possible due to the limitations of physics and there are no indications that cellular carriers are willing to consider the second.