Broadband deployment is more a process than an end state, more a picture of a river than a finished product.
Even if 77 percent of Americans now have access to a low-priced wired broadband plan, compared to just 50 percent one year ago, that can change in an instant when we change the definitions, and we do that.
A “low-priced broadband plan” is defined as a service that costs $60 per month or less (excluding promotional pricing), and has minimum speeds of 25 Mbps download with 3 Mbps upload.
As always, top speeds are another matter. While few consumers buy the budget tier of service, relatively few buy the fastest available tier, either. About 31 percent of U.S. residents have access to a low-priced plan that supports 100 Mbps download with 25 Mbps upload.
About half of all U.S. customers buy services operating between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. In the United Kingdom , about half of customers buy services operating between 30 Mbps and 100 Mbps.
Back before the internet existed, “broadband” was defined as any data rate faster than 1.544 Mbps. So a T-1 line was broadband. My first internet access service faster than dial-up was a 756 kbps service costing something like $300 a month.
Fiber to the home systems of the mid-1990s supported speeds of 10 Mbps. These days definitions vary. But the definitions will change; they always do.
In 2050, access speeds should be in the terabit per second range. How fast will the headline speed be in most countries by 2050? Terabits per second is the logical conclusion, even if the present pace of speed increases is not sustained. Though the average or typical consumer does not buy the “fastest possible” tier of service, the steady growth of headline tier speed since the time of dial-up access is quite linear.
And the growth trend--50 percent per year speed increases--known as Nielsen’s Law--has operated since the days of dial-up internet access. Even if the “typical” consumer buys speeds an order of magnitude less than the headline speed, that still suggests the typical consumer--at a time when the fastest-possible speed is 100 Gbps to 1,000 Gbps--still will be buying service operating at speeds not less than 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps.
Though typical internet access speeds in Europe and other regions at the moment are not yet routinely in the 300-Mbps range, gigabit per second speeds eventually will be the norm, globally, as crazy as that might seem, by perhaps 2050.
The reason is simply that the historical growth of retail internet bandwidth suggests that will happen. Over any decade period, internet speeds have grown 57 times. Since 2050 is three decades off, headline speeds of tens to hundreds of terabits per second are easy to predict.
Some will argue that Nielsen’s Law cannot continue indefinitely, as most would agree Moore’s Law cannot continue unchanged, either. Even with some significant tapering of the rate of progress, the point is that headline speeds in the hundreds of gigabits per second still are feasible by 2050. And if the typical buyer still prefers services an order of magnitude less fast, that still indicates typical speeds of 10 Gbps 30 Gbps or so.
Speeds of a gigabit per second might be the “economy” tier as early as 2030, when headline speed might be 100 Gbps and the typical consumer buys a 10-Gbps service.
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