Future Internet connection speeds

[wjfox]

It was extremely difficult to find data on this from before 2012 or so, which I was quite surprised by. You'd think something as important as Internet connection speeds would have been recorded in more detail, but apparently not.

From the limited studies and reports out there, I was eventually able to put this together. It's for wired connections, i.e. excluding mobile, and is the global average from 1990 until 2050. I'll be posting this in our Data & Trends pages shortly, and updating a couple of predictions on our timeline.

There's a huge difference between the richest/most technologically advanced nations and the poorest/least developed ones. However, within a few decades even the latter will have access to much faster connections.

What applications might be possible with gigabits of bandwidth?

[wjfox]

[Tadasuke]

Interestingly, I have not observed that decrease in acceleration of Internet bandwidths.

In 2011 I had 2 megabits/s and in 2021 I had 200 megabits/s or 100x faster connection.

But I know some people that today have only 5 or 10x faster connection than 10 years ago.

I wonder if in 2031 I will have 20 gigabit/s. Probably not. I guess it's rather improbable.

Higher bandwidths are useful for example for streaming very high-resolution VR videos.

I hope I will at least cross 1 gigabit/s by 2030, that would be something, right?

There are also wireless networks like 5G, but I mostly use fiber optics connections.

And there is something called "Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth". You can look it up.

[caltrek]

The National Broadband Rollout Has a Blind Spot: Lack of Accurate, Transparent Data About Internet Access Speeds
by Sascha Meinrath

Introduction:

(The Conversation) Imagine purchasing “up to” a gallon of milk for US$4.50, or paying for “up to” a full tank of gas. Most people would view such transactions as absurd. And yet, in the realm of broadband service, the use of “up to” speeds has become standard business practice.

Unlike other advertisements for goods and services – for example, what a car manufacturer tells a customer about expected fuel efficiency – there are no federally set standards for measuring broadband service speeds. This means there is no clear way to tell whether customers are getting what they pay for.

Consumers typically purchase an internet service package that promises a speed up to some level – for example, 10 megabits per second, 25Mbps, 100Mbps, 200Mbps or 1000Mbps/1Gbps. But the speed you actually receive can often be much less than the advertised speed. Unlike the vehicle sector’s fuel efficiency standards, there’s no government mandate to systematically improve internet service speeds – and no national strategy for ensuring that slow connections are upgraded in a timely fashion.

A home user’s quality of service can also shift dramatically over relatively short periods of time and can become especially degraded during times of crisis. For example, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic when millions of Americans switched from using their office’s business-class internet connection to teleworking from home using their residential internet service, analysis showed widespread slowdowns in service speeds.

Follow-up research found that during this same time frame, the Federal Communications Commission was inundated with consumer complaints from across the country. Complaints about billing, availability and speed increased from February 2020 to April 2020 by 24%, 85% and 176%, respectively. So even though monthly bills did not change, customers experienced worse service, with lower speeds and less reliability.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/the-nation ... ds-186030