Four Years of Broadband Growth

A fast, reliable Internet connection is as essential to the modern economy as electricity or phone service, and over the last four years, the country has made tremendous progress investing in and delivering high-speed broadband to an unprecedented number of Americans.

We are releasing a new White House report entitled that makes that case even clearer. The results speak for themselves: since 2009, average broadband speeds have doubled, and the percentage of Americans with access to high-speed wireless broadband has more than quadrupled (from under 20% to over 80%). We were the first nation to deploy next-generation 4G/LTE wireless broadband on such a scale, which has in turn helped fuel the demand for the 500 million Internet-connected devices we now own. This technology is doing more than just enriching lives; it is creating jobs. With the right incentives in place over the last four years, companies have invested over $250 billion in broadband infrastructure. The “App economy” that has sprung up in that same time is estimated to have created 500,000 jobs alone. And America is again leading the world in these innovations; six years ago, only 5 percent of the world’s phones ran an operating system that was Made in America – today, over eighty percent do. But there is much more to be done to make sure we fully unleash the potential of this revolution in the way we communicate, learn, and work.