Bandwidth Boom: Measuring Communications Capacity

adminTech Note

See our new paper estimating the growth of consumer bandwidth – or our capacity to communicate – from 2000 to 2008. We found:

  • – a huge 5,400% increase in residential bandwidth;
  • – an astounding 54,200% boom in wireless bandwidth; and
  • – an almost 100-fold increase in total consumer bandwidth

us-consumer-bandwidth-2000-08-res-wireless

U.S. consumer bandwidth at the end of 2008 totaled more than 717 terabits per second, yielding, on a per capita basis, almost 2.4 megabits per second of communications power.