Consumer broadband access quality (speed, latency, availability) always is an evolving and moving target with distinct profiles that vary by geography and other social measures. Rural areas will always lag urban areas on performance metrics, simply because of the high cost of building networks in areas of low density.
Demand also plays a role, as the presence of larger accounts, business customers and higher-income customers will always be higher in cities than rural areas. And suppliers always respond to higher demand.
So inequalities of network performance can persist, even when demonstrable progress is made. In 2020, for example, at least 37 percent of U.S. home locations could buy gigabit services. 54 percent of locations could buy service operating between 100 Mbps and 900 Mbps. About seven percent of locations could buy service operating at the minimum 25 Mbps speed defined as “broadband.”
The areas of real need are the four percent of locations that could not buy service at the minimum. Notably, though, the percentage not able to buy “broadband” is decreasing.
Keep in mind that most people in the United States live on just six percent of the U.S. land surface, according to the USDA. Unsettled or rural areas are exceedingly common.
About 94 percent of the U.S. land surface is unsettled or lightly populated, including mountains, rangeland, cropland and forests.
The point is that rural coverage is important, and also difficult in a continent-sized country with so much largely unpopulated areas.
That noted, everyone expects household data consumption to increase. The trick is planning for future capacity needs in a way that is graceful, and which does not cause firms to fail because they made unwise decisions about how much capacity to supply.
Hundreds of megabits per second is today’s standard.
Tomorrow’s standards will be in the gigabits per second, in all likelihood. The trick is to scale supply to match demand, without over-investing, too soon. Business failure is the risk when suppliers invest in capabilities people do not wish to buy.
In that regard, much of the capacity demand will be driven by content consumption, as has been the case over recent decades. And content consumption is powerfully affected by the number of users sharing any single connection. So much of the demand for the fastest speeds (roughly equating to volume of data consumed) is generated by multi-person households.
Multi-user households using many concurrent super high-quality video applications (extended reality, for example) represent one possible requirement for multi-gigabit-per-second data rates.
Source: Fiber Broadband Association
An important caveat, then, is that there is a huge difference between projected data demand for households of various sizes. A four-user household might require 2 Gbps. A single-person household using the same applications, with the same intensity, might only require 500 Mbps.
A two-person household using the same apps, with the same intensity, might require 1 Gbps. The problem is that all networks must be built to satisfy the requirements of the most-demanding users as well as lighter users; single-person accounts and multi-person accounts.
The U.S. has an average household size of 2.5 persons. That might imply an “average” per-account speed of 1.5 Gbps by 2030.
source: Fiber Broadband Association
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