Home Broadband Now Driven by Entertainment Use Cases

Some 25 years ago, it might have made sense to assume that home use of PCs drove demand for home broadband. That clearly is not the case anymore. These days, video streaming and gaming dominate in-home data demand. Also, in terms of minutes or hours of use, it is likely that mobile devices are bigger sources of engagement than are PCs.

source: Statista 

Leichtman Research Group reports that 90 percent of U.S. households buy an Internet access service at home, up from 84 percent in 2017, and 74 percent in 2007. That figure correlates with PC ownership and use at home. 

That is an important finding for policy advocates since people who do not use PCs or the internet are unlikely to have much interest in home broadband.

The important caveats are that home broadband is useful for users of mobile and gaming devices and for watching streaming video. It would be interesting to see surveys shift to include smartphone use, gaming consoles and streaming video use, essentially ignoring value for PC users, to see if the correlation with home broadband is equally strong. 

It now is likely that the value of home broadband encompasses smartphone, video entertainment, gaming and computing use cases in relatively equal measure. 

Likewise, mapping home broadband to 4K TVs and smartwatches might be useful, though perhaps not as crucial as those other anchor services. Streaming video tends to triple data consumption, and higher-resolution video consumes more data than high-definition TV. 

source: Increase Broadband Speed  

Also, higher resolution video requires more bandwidth than lower-resolution video. Likewise for cloud gaming, a shift away from consoles and to cloud gaming could grow data consumption  six times, according to Kagan, a unit of S&P Global Intelligence. 

source: Increase Broadband Speed 

These days, the devices most commonly connected to home broadband, and the devices most commonly used, are likely to be smartphones, TVs and gaming consoles, rather than PCs. 

Leichtman Research also found that broadband access accounts for 99 percent of households with an Internet service at home. Dial-up might still be used by one percent of customers, in other words, but internet access and broadband now are virtually synonymous. 

Of respondents  that use a laptop or desktop computer at home, 96 percent have an internet access service at home. Those that do not use a laptop or desktop computer at home account for 58 percent of all those that do not get Internet service at home.

But in many parts of the rest of the world, smartphones are likely to remain the way most people get access to the internet. By some estimates, in 2025, for example, about 75 percent of the world’s people will get access to the internet solely using their smartphones. 

The point is that the historic argument that home broadband makes sense for users of PGs is outmoded. Home broadband matters for mobile phone users, gamers and TV watchers. In terms of actual in-home bandwidth consumption, PCs are getting to be the least significant source of data demand.