It often has been said that regulators cannot keep up with the pace of change in computing, broadband and applications. That has proven to be true for regulators looking at home broadband performance.
About 2010 or so Ofcom, the U.K. regulator laid out a national goal for “superfast” internet access of about 30 Mbps, at a time when the typical speed most consumers were able to use was about 6 Mbps.
Average actual U.K. fixed-line residential broadband speeds grew from about 3,6 Mbps in 2008 to about 15 Mbps in 2013.
In 2011, Ofcom warned of low interest in 50-Mbps services, for example.
Ofcom also worried about low interest in 30 Mbps services as well.
That same year, a 50-Mbps internet access connection (home broadband) cost close to $100 a month.
The next formal goal will be gigabit per second access, which shows you just how fast improvements are coming in the home broadband business.
That same degree of improvement was seen in the U.S. market as well. Back in 2010 average U.S. home broadband speeds were about 5 Mbps. By 2019 speeds had climbed to about 33 Mbps.
U.S. median home broadband speeds were about 131 Mbps in October 2021.
By 2050 the home broadband headline speeds are likely to be in terabits per second. 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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