US consumer bandwidth is booming, report says

Contrary to popular opinion, consumer bandwidth in the US has boomed over the last eight years, reaching 717 terabits per second by the end of 2008 or a per-capita average of 2.4 megabits per second in 2008, up from 28 kilobits per second in the year 2000, according to a new report by Entropy Economics. “Bandwidth Boom: Measuring U.S. Communications Capacity from 2000 to 2008” said wireless data bandwidth is a major factor in this growth, growing from a nationwide total of 600 gigabits per second in 2000 to a staggering 325 terabits per second by the end of 2008.

“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,” said Bret Swanson, who founded Entropy Economics in March and was previously executive editor of the Gilder Technology Report and a senior fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. “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.”

Swanson said his numbers, drawn from FCC data and a lot of other sources, reflect an aggregate and won’t 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.”

“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,” Swanson said.

One concern, Swanson said, is that unfounded fears that the US is falling behind could lead to regulation that curtails investment in the broadband infrastructure. Swanson’s latest blog post focuses on the US Justice Department announcement Tuesday that it is investigating whether companies such as AT&T and Verizon are abusing their market power, and whether exclusive deals like the AT&T/Apple iPhone deal hurt consumers.