5 Percent of EC Consumers Buy Internet Access at Speeds of 39 Mbps or Above

There’s a clear gap between very high speed fixed broadband in the European Union countries and the availability of such connections. Only five percent of consumers buy fixed line broadband access at speeds of 30 Mbps and above, although 29 percent of households could buy service at such speeds if they wanted to, according to a new European Commission report.

The point is that there is more to ultra-fast broadband adoption than sometimes seems important. As it turns out, few U.S. customers actually buy services running at 50 Mbps or above, and most of the customers who do buy are probably business customers.

You might argue that the only real problem is that the faster services are too expensive. That’s true, but also difficult to change, as it would be difficult to find any cost savings, in any part of the fixed-line broadband access business, that would allow pricing of 50 Mbps or 100 Mbps services to be sold at similar prices as today's 20-Mbps services.

5 Percent of EC Consumers Buy Internet Access at Speeds of 39 Mbps or Above