Gig+ Speed Broadband Users Now Account for 31% of the U.S. Market, More Than Double in Just One Year

The percentage of U.S. broadband subscribers who take speeds of 1 gigabit per second or faster has more than doubled over the last year and has tripled over the last two years, according to new quarterly data published by Hoboken, New Jersey-based OpenVault.

The company, which provides consulting and analytics tools for internet service providers, said that 31.6% of U.S. broadband customers had provisioned speeds of 1 Gbps or greater as of the end of the second quarter.

That figure stood at just 10.5% at the end of June 2021 and 14.2% as of Q2 2022.

As OpenVault’s reps note, much of this growth has come from operators upgrading speed tiers en masse as they perform major network tech upgrades. For example, last October, Comcast bumped up speeds across five of its tiers, affecting 20 million customers, for free.

This included users of its Extreme Pro/Gigabit plan, which at the time had a provisioned speed of 940 Mbps but was upgraded into true gigabit-speed status.

With all this speed, of course, comes ever-increasing consumption and that didn’t change in the second quarter, gobbling an average of 533.8 gigabytes of home internet data a month, up 9% year over year.

And with the usual overall increase in overall internet consumption comes the continued rise of so-called “power users.”

In the second quarter, market share for subscribers using 1 terabyte or more of monthly data increased by 14.5% to 15.6% of the market.

Those “super power users“ consuming 2 TB or more accounted for 2.8% of the overall broadband market, up 26.2%