The number of Gigabit internet connections is projected to rise tenfold to 10 million by the end of the year, with residential connections accounting for around 70 percent of the total, forecasts Deloitte Global. According to the study, rising demand is being be fuelled by increasing availability and falling prices.
In 2015, the number of Gbps tariffs almost doubled in just three quarters, from just over 80 to more than 150. The 10 million Gigabit subscribers is likely to be a small proportion of 250 million customers expected to be on networks capable of Gbps by the end of the year.
At the end of 2012, the average entry level price for service was over USD 400. By the third quarter of 2015, the average had fallen to under USD 200, and the cheapest package was priced at under USD 50.
Moreover, over the past decade, video streaming services have progressed from offering 0.5 Mbit/s streams, inferior to standard definition (SD) TV, to ultra-high 4K resolution, using 25-50 Mbps, or up to 100 times more bandwidth.
Deloitte predicts that there will be some 600 million subscribers on networks offering a Gigabit tariff by 2020, or over half of the world’s connected homes.
According to the report's authors, "While Gbps subscriptions should surge this year (albeit from close to nothing to niche) the sharpest inflection point for the service may be in terms of perception. For homes, the perceived reasoning for Gbps service will likely evolve from meeting the needs of a single application running on a single device to meeting the aggregate demand from multiple devices. Although a Gbps connection for a single device may be overkill, consumers are likely to continue accumulating connected devices in the long term."
"At the start of 2016, upper quartile homes in developed countries may have already accumulated a dozen connected devices, each of which may individually ‘sip’ data, but collectively, at peak time, might ‘gulp’ data. Through 2020 that dozen may well become dozens. And as average data connections get faster, we expect existing services to become steadily more bandwidth consumptive, new formerly unviable data-intensive services to launch, and new ‘data-gulping’ devices to come to market."
