Is Gigabit Speed Really Available to more than 80% of U.S. Housing Units?

Some question statistics that gigabit internet access now is available (can be purchased) by about 84 percent of U.S. residents, especially when based on data reported to the Federal Communications Commission. 

Others might find the claim that gigabit access is not that widely available a bit incongruous, but not for reasons of FCC data reporting. The NCTA says 80 percent of U.S. homes now can buy gigabit speed internet access, up from about 63 percent in 2018.  

And since cable TV operators in the U.S. market have at least 70 percent installed base, looking only at cable TV data provides a non-duplicated view of access speeds. Assume for the moment zero supply of gigabit services by other internet service providers. 

According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are about 137.9 million U.S. housing units. Not all those units are occupied at any particular time, but ignore that for the moment, 

Roughly 8.8 percent of units are not occupied, typically. Vacant year round units represented 8.8 percent of total housing units, while 2.6 percent were vacant for seasonal use. 

Approximately 2.2 percent of the total units were vacant for rent, 0.7 percent were vacant for sale only and 0.6 percent were rented or sold but not yet occupied. Vacant units that were held off market comprised 5.3 percent of the total housing stock – 1.5 percent were for occasional use, 1.0 percent were temporarily occupied by persons with usual residence elsewhere (URE) and 2.9 percent were vacant for a variety of other reasons.

Add it all up and 88.6 percent of the housing units in the United States in the first quarter of 2020 were occupied and 11.4 percent were vacant, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

For the moment, ignore that. Retail consumer networks are not built to pass only “occupied” dwellings, but all dwellings in an area. If there are 137.9 dwelling units, with an average of 2.6 persons per household, then coverage of 80 percent of U.S. homes equates to 110.3 million locations. At 2.6 persons per home, that suggests 287 million people are in living units able to buy gigabit internet access from cable operators alone. 

If the U.S. population is 382.2 million, then some 75 percent of the U.S. population can buy gigabit internet access from cable operators alone, assuming no coverage provided by telcos or independent internet service providers. 

Those figures track closely with the FCC figures for “people” able to buy gigabit internet access. If you know anything about the way hybrid fiber coax networks are built, you also know that internet access speeds are designed to be the same at every end user node on the network. 

The architecture uses an optical fiber to node design, with very short electrical repeater segments (generally a few amplifiers) between the optical node and any location. Compared to the archaic all-electrical designs, that means top speeds do not decline with distance to any appreciable extent. 

The point is that if an HFC network is designed and built to support gigabit speeds, it will provide speeds close to that at all locations reached by the network, much as a fiber-to-home network would do. 

The point is that I cannot think of a good reason why the cable claim of passing 80 percent of U.S. home locations with gigabit service available is not believable. 

And that is assuming zero non-overlapping coverage by all other ISPs. After all, all ISPs build gigabit facilities where they believe the demand is greatest. Those also are the places where competition arguably is greatest, such as high-income suburban areas. 

That noted, surveys of rural telcos conducted by the NTCA have found that 25 percent of respondents offer gigabit internet access, while gigabit speeds are offered by a growing number of U.S. ISPs.