Growing Broadband Demand

Two concrete examples of rapidly growing broadband demand are schools and internet service provider (ISP) backhaul. A decade ago, there was a scramble to get gigabit broadband access to schools. Because of the use of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) E-rate money, a lot of schools across the country got connected to fiber and were able to buy faster broadband. The original goal was to get a gigabit connection to each school, and almost every school in many states met that goal. More recently, the FCC created an updated goal that schools ought to have access to at least 1 Mbps of simultaneous capacity for each student. Another example of fast growing demand is ISP backhaul. These are the broadband connections that connect local networks to the Internet. I can remember helping folks find backbone connections a decade ago, and a typical small ISP might have purchased a connection with an overall 10-gigabit capacity but only provisioned a few gigabits of capacity on the connection. ISPs assumed that the connection capacity was going to be good for many years as they added a gigabit or two once in a while. But according to the OpenVault data, the average broadband consumption for homes and businesses has more than tripled just since the end of 2017.