Gig Internet tiers
OpenVault: U.S. broadband users on 1-Gig tiers climbed to 26% in Q4 2022
The 4Q22 edition of the OpenVault Broadband Insights (OVBI) report indicates that average household broadband consumption neared 600 GB per month, the percentage of subscribers on gigabit tiers more than doubled, and usage by participants in the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) continued to outpace that of the general population. OpenVault expects household data usage to surpass 600GB by Q4 2023 and possibly reach 1 terabyte by the end of 2028.
Editor’s Note: OpenVault bases its findings on data from “millions” of individual broadband subscribers that are collected and aggregated from a software-as-a-service broadband service management tool in use by a wide range of ISPs. The data is used to pinpoint usage patterns, including the differences between two key categories: subscribers on flat-rate billing (FRB) plans that offer unlimited data usage and those on usage-based billing (UBB) plans, on which subscribers are billed based on their bandwidth consumption. OpenVault data is used for benchmarking purposes by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in specific comparative analyses.
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With broadband consumption on the rise, there’s been an increase in “power users” – households that use more than 1TB of data per month. The percentage of users at that level rose 18.7% year-over-year. “Super power users” – those consuming 2TB or more per month – climbed 25%, from 2.7% to 3.4%. That’s a nearly 30x increase within the past five years, OpenVault said.
- European average data usage (268.1 GB) grew 12.5% from a year ago, a faster pace than the North American annual growth rate of 9.4%.
- North American median data usage (396.6 GB) was more than 2.5x that of European median data usage (148.2 GB) in 4Q22, a slightly smaller difference than observed in 4Q21.
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The percentage of U.S. broadband subs on 1-Gig (or higher speed) tiers climbed to 26% in Q4 2022, more than double the 12.2% observed in the year-ago period, OpenVault. As broadband speeds increase, the percentage of broadband customers provisioned for speeds of 200 Mbit/s or less is on the decline – 31% at the end of 2022, down 43% year-over-year, OpenVault found. Adoption of gigabit speeds has jumped significantly among Usage Based Billing (UBB) subscribers, increasing to almost 35% in 4Q22 from 13.4% in 4Q21.
OpenVault found that average data usage in households on the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Plan (ACP) continues to outpace the field. In Q4, average usage in ACP households was 688.7GB, 17% higher than the broader average of 586.7GB. OpenVault has observed that some households in the ACP program use the funds to upgrade to faster speed packages.
References:
https://openvault.com/resources/ovbi/ (register to download the report)