Will Consumers be Buying Home Broadband at 1 Gbps to 4 Gbps in 2025?

How soon will the headline speed for home broadband reach 10 Gbps? And what does that imply for the speeds most consumers will purchase?

There is widespread expectation that the headline speed for home broadband, in many markets, will be 10 Gbps by about 2025. By other rules of thumb, that also suggests the "typical" home broadband customer will be buying service at rates between 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps, with a significant percentage buying service at 4 Gbps.

The top home broadband headline speeds matter, even when most mainstream home broadband buyers never buy the fastest tiers of service. The reason, simply, is that mainstream buyers gravitate to the mid-tier packages as the best combination of value and price, not the fastest or budget tiers of service. 

source: Openvault 

In the third quarter of 2021, for example, 66 percent of U.S. households purchased service operating between 100 Mbps and 400 Mbps, according to Openvault, when the top tier of service was 1 Gbps. 

You might say price anchoring is at work. Price anchoring applies for list costs of consumer broadband services no less than for other products.  

"Price anchoring" is the reason most consumers able to buy gigabit internet access do not do so. Price anchoring is the tendency for consumers to evaluate all offers in relation to others. As the saying goes, the best way to sell a $2,000 watch is to put it right next to a $10,000 watch.

 

source: Point Topic 

In the United Kingdom for example, 86 percent of consumers buy service at speeds of 30 Mbps or about 100 Mbps, even when the headline speeds have reached a gigabit per second and are now in the early stages of heading for 10 Gbps and terabits per second by 2050  

As Nielsen’s Law suggests, the headline speeds grow at an average of 50 percent per year, typically in star step fashion as platform upgrades are made. 

Nielsen Norman Group estimates suggest a headline speed of 10 Gbps will be commercially available by about 2025. 

source: NCTA  

By 2030, Nielsen’s Law suggests, the fixed network headline speed will be 85 Gbps. The implication is that typical mobile speeds--which often lag fixed network speeds by an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude--will by 2030 be looking at speeds up to 8.5 Gbps, but possibly as “low” as 1 Gbps per connection. 

Since most mobile device instances of use are “single user,” mobile speeds do not have to share bandwidth as do home broadband accounts, where multiple devices are supported by a single home broadband connection. 

That also implies that mobile speeds do not have to match fixed network speeds to remain competitive or useful. 

source: IDtechex

Population Density "Predicts" Economic Growth; Quality Broadband Does Not

Though virtually everyone supports ubiquitous, quality broadband services, and even as policymakers and infrastructure interests always claim broadband is a platform for economic development, those claims almost always are unprovable.

At the micro level, “broadly speaking, there are two main sources of economic growth:  growth in the size of the workforce and growth in the productivity (output per hour worked) of that workforce,” economists might say. 

It might be argued that broadband helps with both, in the same way that roads, electricity, education and skill levels, “quality of life” attractions, airports and other transportation hubs, education, health and other social infrastructure also might be viewed as underpinning prospects for growth. 

Population density and geographical remoteness also are underlying issues. Though poverty, health care, educational attainment and other background issues exist in isolated rural areas, one reason economic development is stunted in such areas is low population density and remoteness. 

Most economic activity takes place in proximity to urban population centers, in large part because that is where most consumers and buyers live, and where the logistical costs of creating and delivering products is most favorable. 

In some areas, strength builds on strength, as a large, important economic activity creates an ecosystem that attracts other firms. 

Beyond all that, correlation is not causation. We might well note that quality broadband tends to exist where economic growth and other indices--educational attainment, incomes, wealth, housing prices, quality of schools and quality of life--also are high. 

Though it is widely believed that broadband access leads to economic growth, that cannot be proved, though many studies suggest a correlation. But correlation is not causation. 

“A  positive relationship between broadband expansion and employment growth could arise for other reasons,” says Jed Kolko of the Public Policy Institute of California. “For example, if

broadband providers expand in locations where they anticipate future growth, then the positive relationship would in part or entirely reflect this strategic decision of providers rather than a causal effect of broadband on growth.”

“Alternatively, population growth could cause both broadband expansion and employment

growth: Broadband providers could invest in areas where population (and therefore demand for broadband) is growing, while at the same time population growth could cause employment growth in industries (such as retail, restaurants, and personal services) that serve local populations<” Kolko says. 

We know correlations exist. But that does not mean we can prove that quality broadband actually produces outcomes such as economic growth, as much as we all believe it contributes to social outcomes we prefer.

We Might Already be Wrong about New 5G Revenue Sources

Fixed wireless is projected to provide nearly a third (32 percent) of global gross domestic product value generated by mid-band 5G spectrum; providing value, greater than internet of things or ultra-reliable connectivity use cases, according to a new report by the GSMA, and trailing only “higher bandwidth” in impact. 

If that proves true--or if fixed wireless creates that much revenue for mobile operators, it would be an early example of unforeseen and important new use cases for a next-generation network. That almost always happens with mobile next-generation platforms. 

source: GSMA

“Fixed wireless” does not generally get mentioned when the benefits of 5G are discussed. The traditional triad of enhanced mobile broadband, massive IoT and low latency use cases does not include fixed wireless. 

source: ITU 

So 5G fixed wireless--if it emerges as expected--will be a very-important early-stage 5G revenue enhancer. In fact, fixed wireless could well generate more near term revenue than does edge computing, internet of things or private networks. 

“For the period 2020 to 2030, almost 75 percent of the benefits of mid-band 5G will come from enhanced mobile broadband and fixed wireless access use cases and related applications,” a new report by GSMA argues.

That would be a big deal.

Edge Computing Growth Led by Data Centers to 2025

Edge computing  products, services and solutions will grow to reach US$17.8 billion in 2025, up from an estimated US$8 billion in 2019, at a compound annual growth (CAGR) rate of 15.6 percent, according to GlobalData. 

source: Global Data 

International Data Corporation estimates are higher. IDC projects enterprise and service provider spending on edge computing will reach $40 billion in 2022 in Europe alone. 

Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to be $176 billion in 2022, an increase of 14.8 percent over 2021, according to IDC. The two edge use cases that will see the largest investments in 2022 – content delivery networks and virtual network functions – are both foundational to service providers' edge services offerings. Combined, these two use cases will generate nearly $26 billion in spending in 2022.

Across enterprise end user industries, discrete and process manufacturing combined will invest $33.6 billion in edge solutions this year. Retail and professional services will also see spending of more than $10 billion on edge computing in 2022, says IDC. 

source: IDC 

From a geographic perspective, the United States will be the largest investor in edge solutions with spending forecast to reach $76.5 billion in 2022. Western Europe and China will be the next largest regions with spending totals of $30.6 and $20.8 billion, respectively. 

China will see the fastest spending growth over the five-year forecast with a CAGR of 19.7 percent, followed by Latin America at 19.4 percent.

By 2025, edge computing in Europe alone will reach $64 billion, IDC forecasts,  with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4 percent.

In North America, sales of edge computing products, services and solutions will amount to US$6.85 billion by 2025, which is equivalent to 38 percent of the total global market. 

Sales in Asia Pacific and Western Europe will amount to US$4.65 billion and US$3.39 billion, respectively, equivalent to 26.4 percent and 19.3 percent of the total global market.

Frontier Communications Adds 2-Gbps Service Across Full Fiber Footprint

Frontier Communications says it is the”  first and only major ISP to deliver network-wide 2 Gig internet service” across its entire fiber footprint. The caveat is that this does not mean every customer can buy the service, only that some customers in all markets can do so.

source: Frontier

That is notable, if incomplerte, and a sign that Nielsen’s Law still holds. Nielsen’s Law predicts that the fastest broadband speeds will grow at 50 percent per year. That does not mean the “typical” customer buys service at those top-end rates, but does correlate with faster speeds all along the buying curve, including the mid-tier and lowest-tier services. 

source: Cablelabs 

The Symmetrical 2 Gig fiber speeds cost $149.99 per month and also come with free next-generation  total home Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 6e) and free Amazon Fire TV; a free webcam; a free voice line;  free activation; free premium tech support and free multi-device security.

Note the bundling of a voice line as a feature of the internet access service. 

source: S&P Global Market Intelligence 

The Frontier Fiber 2 Gig offer also features:

• 2.5 times lower latency than cable modem service

• Up to 50 times faster upload speed than cable

• Real-time viewing for 1Tb photo library

• 99.99 percent  network reliability

Is Conventional Wisdom Wrong About Revenue Growth?

The conventional wisdom is that enterprise services, underpinned by internet of things use cases, offer the biggest new revenue sources for service providers, but that remains to be seen. 

Ericsson data suggests internet access--across mobile and fixed domains--could well supply the greatest revenue lift, and most of that will come from consumer segments of the market. 

Consumer services including mobile, fixed voice, broadband, TV and video services accounted for an average of 56 percent of revenues for service providers globally in 2019, according to Ericsson. 

In the mobile market, the consumer business generated 79 percent of overall mobile broadband revenues for service providers and this is expected to increase to 81 percent by 2024, Ericsson also predicts. 

On the other hand, business customer revenues represented up to 44 percent of total revenues. The issue is the extent to which business or consumer markets will add the most incremental revenue upside in the 5G and coming eras, says Grandview Research.

The point is that consumer services might yet prove to be the driver of industry revenue growth over the next decade, despite the growing importance of new use cases including internet of things, edge computing and private networks that are primarily viewed as enterprise or business sources. 

Much will hinge on how fast some legacy sources including mobile voice, fixed voice and linear entertainment subscription revenues fall. 

Net change then is dictated by how fast new sources can grow, as well as how fast average revenue per account can grow in the key internet access area.

Aside from total market growth, some firms will see key revenue drivers shift as a result of market share gains or losses.

Fixed wireless might be key for some contestants while mobile market share shifts will drive growth for some contestants. The consumer market is likely to dominate results in those cases.

Beginnings of a Shift Towards Shared Infrastructure in Connectivity Business?

In computing, one way of characterizing the rise of cloud computing is to note that cloud computing represents a shift towards shared infrastructure rather than dedicated infrastructure. 

Shared infrastructure has not generally seen as big a shift in the connectivity business, with the exception of subsea optical fiber networks, which often these days are funded by consortia.

Mobile operators might lease space on cell towers rather than owning those towers, but the radios themselves are not shared. Each mobile operator’s radio infrastructure remains private and dedicated. 

There are some instances of national wholesale networks for fixed network access, and some new efforts to create similar models for 5G, as in Malaysia.

Mobile virtual network operators provide an example of shared infrastructure in a more limited sense. 

And while there also is more institutional investor and private equity investment in access networks and data centers globally, few of those investments entail converting to a shared infrastructure model. 

But there are some signs of change. Virgin Media O2 is looking at creating a joint venture to fund a fiber to home expansion to seven million U.K. homes, in something of a historic shift. Rarely--if ever--have cable TV companies actually entertained such a move. 

To be sure, there would still be a participation in “owner’s economics.” But the plan would lessen the amount of ownership of the core facilities. Also, while cable operators have never been proponents of wholesale operations, VMO2 contemplates providing wholesale access as a core feature of the payback model for the joint venture.  

In part, the change grows from both supply and demand changes: more demand for investment in infrastructure assets globally, and greater stresses in the payback model for privately-owned access facilities. 

“If you’re an infrastructure fund that’s run out of airports and toll roads to buy, you like the profile and upside (of data centers),” said Chris Moon,  ING managing director.

“Dry Powder” for Infrastructure Investment Globally

source: bfinance 

The shift towards shared infrastructure will be propelled in part by institutional investor payback strategies.  

“More often than not, we’ll be extracting assets from integrated operators,” say Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners’ Yacine Saidji and John Watson. “Prior to the transaction, those assets will have had only one client. Part of our value creation will be making that asset available to whoever wants to use it.”

Similar trends are likely to arise in the mobile infrastructure area, especially for support of indoor access requiring small cells. 

One way or the other, demand and supply pressures are going to increase interest in shared infrastructure in the connectivity, data center and small cell and indoor mobile access areas.

Can You Enjoy Metaverse Without Edge Computing?

Edge computing is certain to play a bigger role in our computing fabric as augmented reality, virtual reality and future Metaverse environments become possible. “Even at ultra-low latency, it makes little sense to stream (versus locally process) AR data given the speed at which a camera moves and new input data is received (i.e. literally the speed of light and from only a few feet away),” says Matthew Ball, EpyllionCo managing partner.

The conventional wisdom today is that multi-player games, to say nothing of more-immersive applications, do not work when total latency is greater than 150 milliseconds and user experience is impaired when latency is as low as 50 milliseconds, says Ball. 

source: Matthew Ball 

Will the Metaverse require 1,000 times more computing power? Intel thinks so. And that implies we might be decades away from a ubiquitous and widely-accepted Metaverse that people actually use routinely. 

“Consider what is required to put two individuals in a social setting in an entirely virtual environment: convincing and detailed avatars with realistic clothing, hair and skin tones; all rendered in real time and based on sensor data capturing real world 3D objects, gestures, audio and much more; data transfer at super high bandwidths and extremely low latencies; and a persistent model of the environment, which may contain both real and simulated elements,” says Raja Koduri, Intel SVP and GM of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics Group. “Now, imagine solving this problem at scale--for hundreds of millions of users simultaneously--and you will quickly realize that our computing, storage and networking infrastructure today is simply not enough to enable this vision.”

“We need several orders of magnitude more powerful computing capability, accessible at much lower latencies across a multitude of device form factors,” says Koduri. 

“Truly persistent and immersive computing, at scale and accessible by billions of humans in real time, will require even more: a 1,000-times increase in computational efficiency from today’s state of the art,” he notes. 

Whales Really Do Matter, for Firms of Any Size

Whales matter, in business, and for just about every business. Look at expected profit contributions across a firm’s customer base. The first 20 percent of customers will supply the most cumulative profit. The tail of the last 80 percent of customers might contribute almost nothing in that regard. 

source: Baker Tilly 

How can a software startup better estimate where its revenue might come from? Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, actually has thought quite a lot about that subject. Basically, it appears the Pareto Principle holds for software startups, across the full range of firm sizes. 

“I think people talk about concentration as if there are a couple of companies that have revenue concentration issues, and then the rest are fine,” says Iregbulem. “ It just turned out that literally every company has pretty high customer concentration, not in the sense that there was one customer that was 10 percent of revenue, but in the sense that there was a subset of customers that were a pretty meaningful share, something like 20 percent being 70 percent of revenue.”

source: Nnamdi Regbulem 

In other words, in every industry segment, it is not just “whales” who see Pareto distributions, but firms of every size in every segment. The implications are clear enough: even a smaller firm targeting a smallish niche is going to have its own “whales” (a few customers than anchor total revenues). The same goes for profits. 

source: Baker Tilly 

“It’s a very common mistake I find among investors where they'll meet a company, the company will have X number of customers and the standard ACV (average contract value) will be fairly small because most of their users are either free users or in some kind of lowest-tier version of the product,” says Iregbulem. “But they do have a couple of meaningful customers that are spending real revenue or paying the highest tier of a product or what have you.”

It is not unusual for as much as 60 percent of customers to provide no more than “breakeven” performance, in terms of profitability. 

source: Baker Tilly 

In other words, software monetization is a power law. A power law distribution is a curve that looks like this: most of the results are generated by a small fraction of instances, products or customers. “Rather than the exception, high concentration is the norm in certain verticals (for example cloud infrastructure) or pricing models (consumption/pay-as-you-go) where a "customer" can be as small as tens of dollars per month,” he notes. 

source: Reaction Wheel 

In the data center and connectivity businesses, that rule tends to hold as well. A handful of customers anchor demand for global bandwidth and data center capacity. The rule also seems for  devices connected to Wi-Fi. 

“Combined, the above insights form a mathematical justification for "land and expand"-style go-to-market strategies,” he adds. “Here, land and expand is effectively an indexing strategy: land at as many organizations with as little investment as possible.”

“Every once in a while you'll land a Google, a Facebook, or an Amazon (both figuratively and literally) which will drive a disproportionate share of revenue,” he says.”Even if those customers start off small, any given customer could potentially become quite large.”

Whales matter, in business, for revenues and profits.

Hybrid Access Networks Might Get More Hybrid

The “hybrid” in “hybrid fiber coax” has been a key strategic approach used by the cable industry more generally. Fiber and coax; owned spectrum and mobile virtual network operator; MVNO and Wi-Fi offload; linear video and on-demand streaming; analog and digital; content ownership and distribution.

Keep in mind the "hybrid" business strategy often suggests itself at times of key technological change. Perhaps the classic example is the transition from sailing ships to steam-powered ships, when for 100 years many sailing ships were outfitted with steam boilers, but used both methods of propulsion.

The key point is that any hybrid still represents a transition strategy "from something to something else."

Now hybrid looks to happen for next-generation access networks. Cox Communications, joining others such as Comcast, says it will deploy fiber to the home and DOCSIS 4.0 networks using HFC. 

Though Cox has given few details, the network aims to supply 10 Gbps. Cox does not say whether that is symmetrical or not. DOCSIS 4.0 will feature upstream speeds to 6 Gbps, as the standard calls for. FTTH is almost certainly going to be symmetrical.  

 In a first, Virgin Media O2 plans to operate its gigabit hybrid fiber coax network side by side with the coming fiber to home network. That has never been done before at scale, if ever, by a cable TV company. 

The best analogy is the way mobile network operators run several generations of mobile networks simultaneously, using discrete radios, spectrum and often towers or radio sites. When telcos deploy optical fiber, they decommission the copper access network. 

That decision should have operating cost implications, positive and negative. On the positive side of the ledger, VMO2 will not have to migrate customers from the hybrid fiber coax network to the FTTH network in every case. 

That will save truck roll costs, customer premises equipment costs and some amount of customer service work to explain and convince people to switch over. 

On the negative side of the ledger, supporting two separate networks, with different underlying technologies, will not provide clear operating cost advantages. Energy costs for two networks will be necessary. Support staff will have to be trained to support both networks. 

It is possible migration will not be necessary in a majority of cases, for some time. So we will have to wait and see how the operating cost advantages and disadvantages appear over time. 

Take rates will be important. Though VMO2’s national FTTH network will  not operate in parallel everywhere, it will do so in areas where the HFC network already operates, which might mean 15.6 million or so homes. Seven milliion homes will have FTTH only.  

Cox and Comcast will operate two networks as well; just not two networks in the same area, as a rule. FTTH will undoubtedly be targeted to business-rich areas or higher-demographic suburban areas first, where the demand for multi-gigabit service is expected to develop first.

Virgin Media O2 Will Run HFC Network Side by Side with the New FTTH Network, in a First

In a first, Virgin Media O2 plans to operate its gigabit hybrid fiber coax network side by side with the coming fiber to home network. That has never been done before at scale, if ever, by a cable TV company. 

“We don't intend to shut down the HFC network,” Fries says. “ In fact, it wouldn't be surprising to me if the HFC network were operating for quite some time in a sort of a dual mode because we don't want to force migration to fiber.”

That sort of flies in the face of the argument that running a single network costs less than running two at the same time. That suggests operating cost savings will not be a significant part of the upgrade of the whole network to FTTH. 

“In our case, we'll migrate people to fiber who want 1, 2, 3, 10-gig,” says Fries. “But if you're happy with your 500-meg or your 250-meg, we may or may not incur the cost of migrating a customer from HFC to FTTH. 

“We continue to see cost per premise decline to below GBP 600 (USD 816) per premise as we use more of BT's passive infrastructure, and that only improves the significant return on capital we're already seeing from this investment,” says Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries. “We are accelerating our Lightning build program in 2022 from around 330,000 homes last year to over 500,000 homes this year.”

“Second, we completed the 50,000 home fiber-to-the-premise trial that supports our previously announced intentions to upgrade our entire 15 million homes to fiber by 2028,” says Fries. That build confirms Virgin Media O2 assumptions about build cost. 

“VMO2 will commit to be an exclusive anchor tenet of the network” while also opening up the network on a wholesale basis to other internet service providers, he says. 

In practice, since the whole VMO2 HFC network runs at gigabit downstream speeds, the only customers that would choose to migrate are those that want higher upstream speeds or “faster than gig” downstream speeds.