US sees 'broadband boom' this decade

Entropy Economics says the US government should avoid making huge changes in its deregulatory telecom policies because consumers have seen a "broadband boom" since 2000. "Some interest groups have asserted we live in a sort of digital Dark Age," said Bret Swanson, the paper's author and president of Entropy Economics. "But this didn't seem quite right to us, so we attempted to measure the growth of consumer bandwidth -- or the capacity to communicate -- over the last several years." Residential broadband speeds in the U.S. grew by 54 times between 2000 and 2008, while wireless broadband speeds grew by a factor of 542.

Swanson was previously executive editor of the Gilder Technology Report and a senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation.