Gigabit Services are Right on Schedule According to Edholm's Law and Nielsen's Law

U.S. home broadband customers buying gigabit tiers of service grew 35 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2022, according to Openvault. At the moment, more than 15 percent of U.S. home broadband accounts use gigabit connections. 

Also, more than half of home broadband accounts buy service in the 200 Mbps to 400 Mbps range. That group grew 100 percent year over year. 

A little more than a year ago about half of households were buying service in the 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps range, showing that Nielsen’s Law and Edholm’s Law of bandwidth supply continue to operate. 

source: Openvault 

Edholm’s Law states that internet access bandwidth at the top end increases at about the same rate as Moore’s Law suggests computing power will increase. Nielsen's Law essentially is the same as Edholm’s Law, predicting an increase in the headline speed of about 50 percent per year. 

Nielsen's Law, like Edholm’s Law, suggests a headline speed of 10 Gbps will be commercially available by about 2025, so the commercial offering of 2-Gbps and 5-Gbps is right on the path to 10 Gbps. 

source: NCTA  

Headline speeds in the 100-Gbps range should be commercial sometime around 2030. 

How fast will the headline speed be in most countries by 2050? Terabits per second is the logical conclusion. 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. 

Gigabit tier subscribers hit an inflection point last year. The rule of thumb is that any successful and widely-bought consumer technology enters its mass adoption phase when about 10 percent of homes are users. For U.S. gigabit adoption, that happened in 2021. 

Some might attribute the Covid pandemic and work from home as driving the change, but adoption rates would have taken off in 2021 in any case, as predicted by the 10-percent-of-homes adoption theory. 

It also is easy to predict that 2 Gbps to 4 Gbps is the next evolution, as speeds at the top end continue to increase by 50 percent a year. Ny 2025 we should start seeing the first 10-Gbps services deployed at scale.