One subtlety when assessing the state of U.S. broadband access is evaluating the real prices people actually pay, compared to posted retail prices. In the U.S. market, for example, perhaps 60 percent of fixed network customers buy internet access as part of a bundle.
That, in turn, means it is not possible to know precisely how much the broadband component costs, as two or more services are offered for a single monthly price.
It might be easier to track actual prices for internet access if more customers buy stand-alone internet access. In the first quarter of 2021, the percentage of U.S. broadband households with stand-alone broadband service increased to 41 percent.
These consumers pay $64 per month on average for stand-alone broadband service, up from $39 per broadband household in 2011, a 64 percent growth rate over a decade. In part, that is because customers are buying service operating at faster rates.
In the fourth quarter of 2011, the average U.S. fixed network speed was less than 5 Mbps, as hard as that might be to believe.
About 9.6 percent of U.S. home broadband accounts now buy service at 1 Gbps, says Openvault. That is important because, historically, successful consumer products hit an adoption inflection point at about 10 percent adoption rates. In the colloquial, what happens is that “you buy because your neighbor has it.”
More significantly, about half of customers buy service operating at rates from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. Roughly a third of U.S. home broadband accounts offer speeds above 200 Mbps. We can safely predict that average speeds will continue to increase. Since average speed increased by two orders of magnitude from 2011 to 2021, we can assume roughly the same increase by 2031.
That suggests the typical home broadband service will operate somewhere between 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps in a decade.
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