US left in China’s wake in the quest for Gigabit broadband

Gigabit broadband growth, faster than expected

“We expect Asia to reach 233 million 1 Gbps lines, Europe 59.6 million, the US 37.7 million and Latin America just 10.7 million. China alone is expected to have 193.5 million.”

While there is an argument that almost no-one currently really needs 1 Gbps quite yet, there have been 1 Gbps fiber services in a number of countries for a number of years, but without earning a wide uptake.

The emergence of 1 Gbps is being tied by operators to Gigabit class WiFi services, themselves just emerging, able to cope with real world workloads in excess of 1 Gbps.

Gigabit broadband will accelerate faster than previous forecasts have imagined, growing tenfold over the next 5 years. After a two year period of being high priced luxuries, 1 Gbps broadband will become commonplace and inexpensive.

China will improve its broadband monumentally, taking 1 Gbps subscribers from 4% of its 456 million households, to close over 42%, in a series of massive build-outs led by China Mobile. And as fiber picks up momentum, the window of opportunity is closing for technologies such as Gfast, G.Now and MoCA Access as more buildings opt for fiber direct to the home or apartment. The one exception is DOCSIS 3.1, which is triggering US cable 1 Gbps installations.

Companies mentioned in this report:

Alibaba, Alcatel, Altice, AT&T, Bell Canada, Broadcom, CenturyLink, Charter, China Mobile, China TieTong, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogeco, Comcast, Cox, Deutsche Telekom, Frontier, Google, Huawei, Korea Telecom, MoCA, Netflix, Nokia, Reliance, Reliance Jio, Rogers, Sckipio, Shaw, South Korea Telecom and Verizon.

For more information contact
Natalia Szczepanek
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