Based on the findings of a new report from Entropy Economics the amount of bandwidth used by consumers has jumped a huge amount in the last eight years, which is contrary to the current popular opinion of broadband usage.
This latest report has shown that in 2008 the US consumer bandwidth had reached 717 Terabits per second which equates to a 2.4Mbps per capita average during 2008. This per capita figure is a huge increase compared to the 38Kbps figure from back in 2000.
A key factor in this consumer bandwidth growth is wireless data bandwidth, which has jumped from 600Gbps in 2000 to an incredible 325 Terabits per second in 2008, according to ‘Bandwidth Boom: Measuring US Communication Capacity from 2000 to 2008.’
The previous editor of Gilder Technology Report, senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation and now the founder of Entropy Economics, Bret Swanson said recently “The idea that has been thrown around – mostly by groups that may want much heavier regulation of the whole communications media space — that we live in some sort of digital dark age is not remotely true. We had fallen behind during the early part of the decade, during our telecom crash. But we have had this bandwidth boom – almost 100 times more communications capacity over the last eight years. We are on the right path.”
The figures that have been drawn from a number of sources including FCC data are an aggregate and will not mean “that there are some geographic areas, and some towns, that don’t have the best tools. We need to keep expanding our geographic coverage and get more people online, better adoption rates,” according to Swanson.
He also added “We also need to continue to bandwidth boom, both to accommodate new applications and innovations that are already in the pipeline, like video and videoconferencing and other real-time applications, and to keep driving new creative innovations that we haven’t thought of yet.”
Source – http://telephonyonline.com