Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2012

The Federal Communications Commission issued a report summarizing information about Internet access connections over 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in at least one direction in service in the United States as of December 31, 2012, having gathered standardized information about subscribership to Internet access services in the fifty states, District of Columbia, and inhabited insular areas (American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin Islands).

Notable developments between December 2011 and December 2012 include:

• Internet connections overall are growing. The number of connections over 200 kbps in at least one direction increased by 14% year-over-year to nearly 262 million.
• At year-end 2012, there were almost 65 million fixed and 64 million mobile connections with download speeds at or above 3 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds at or above 768 kbps as compared to 51 million fixed and 31 million mobile connections a year earlier. Figure 1 illustrates the trend in connections speeds from December 2009 through December 2012, and Figure 2 presents a side-by-side comparison of fixed and mobile connection speeds in December 2012.
• The number of connections with downstream speeds of at least 10 Mbps increased by 35% over December 2011, to 60 million connections.
• Growth is particularly high in mobile Internet subscriptions. The number of mobile subscriptions with speeds over 200 kbps in at least one direction grew to more than 169 million -- up 19% from December 2011. The number of fixed-location connections at speeds over 200 kbps in at least one direction increased by 5% year-over-year to nearly 93 million.

[Dec 24]