Telecom companies building their broadband networks for the stresses of tomorrow often point to the use cases of live-streamed major sports events. And the April 4 NCAA Mens Basketball Championship showdown, featuring Kansas edging fellow blue blood program North Carolina 72-69, provides as good of an example as any.
According to OpenVault, a Hoboken, N.J.-based company that helps telecom clients measure and optimize their broadband usage and efficiency, broadband usage across the state of Kansas surged 24% over the previous three-week average as the game reached its final minutes at 10 p.m. local time.
Other Interesting Points from OpenVault's Q1 2022 'Broadband Insights' Report
The percentage of U.S. broadband users subscribing to ISP tiers of 1 gigabit-per-second and above has reached 13.4%, up from the 9.8% reported in OpenVault's Q1 2021 report.
And "power users," those subscribers who go through 1 terabyte or more of data per month, increased from 12.4% to 14.6% of the market, year over year, according to OpenVault. And "super power users" -- those who consume 2 TB or above per month -- went from 1.8% to 2.4% of the market. (Both figures represent a weighted average of customers billed on both flat-rate and usage-based plans.)
