The percentage of U.S. broadband subscribers who are provisioned for 1-gigabit-per-second download speeds and higher reached 9.8% in the first quarter.
The market share figure represents a 261% year-over-year increase—as of the first quarter of 2020, only 3.8% of broadband customers had pricey 1-gig service, according to OpenVault, a Hoboken, N.J. provider of software, service and data solutions to high-speed internet providers.
U.S. broadband providers have spent billions of dollars on upgrades over the last decade to DOCSIS 3.1 and FTTH standards, all aimed at providing download speeds in excess of 940 Mbps. These services have been available for five years, but only a sliver of the market pays for them.
OpenVault’s latest report also notes that slightly more than 80% of U.S. broadband customers are provisioned for download speeds of 100 Mbps or higher.
Notably, OpenVault found that broadband usage continues to moderate following a pandemic year featuring share increases.
Monthly weighted average usage was 461.7 gigabytes in the first quarter of 2021, up nearly 15% from 402.5 GB in Q1 of 2020, but down 4.3% from 482.6 in the second quarter of last year.
Power users—defined as customers who use more than 1 terabyte of data per month dropped 12% to 12.4% of the market. And “extreme power users”—those who chew up more than 2 TB—dropped 14% to 1.8% of broadband users.
