Study Finds Gig-Plus Broadband Users Have More Than Doubled in the Last Year

The percentage of U.S. broadband subscribers who take speeds of 1 Gbps 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 OpenVault in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The company, which provides consulting and analytics tools for internet service providers, reports 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 the second quarter of 2022.

OpenVault reports that 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.

Hand in hand with increased speed is ever-increasing consumption, and that didn’t change in the second quarter: An average of 533.8 gigabytes of home internet data was consumed monthly, up 9% year over year.

Accompanying the overall increase in internet consumption is the continued rise of “power users.” In the second quarter, market share for subscribers using 1 terabyte (TB) or more of monthly data increased by 14.5% to 15.6% of the market. Those users consuming 2 TB or more accounted for 2.8% of the overall broadband market, up 26.2%.