How many people have a gigabit connection? Fewer than you think.

As Google expands its commitment to bringing fiber-to-the-home gigabit connections to more places, I wondered exactly how many people actually have gigabit connections. So I asked Ookla, the company that operates the Speedtest.net service for its data.

Turns out, there’s no real way to calculate who has a gig, but the numbers we do have indicate that not too many people are living in the future when it comes to connectivity. It turns out that between the first of this year and April 8 (when I got the data from Ookla) roughly one in 10,000 devices in the U.S. are surfing at gigabit speeds and roughly 1 in 5,000 homes worldwide can match them. Ookla runs the popular Speedtest.Net service and got this data from users who tested their connections during that time period. Ookla actually measure customers with speeds of above 800 Mbps, which is what it classifies as a gigabit. In the U.S. only 4,110 people have test results at that speed out of 45,468,731 people who used the Ookla tests. Globally, 34,721 users have speeds that high out of 224,404,945 tests. But, clearly not every broadband user is running Speedtest.net or has the right equipment.