Availability and Adoption of Broadband Usage in USA

By Khandaker Foysal Haque,

PhD student, Northeastern University 

Broadband simply refers to the transmission of wide bandwidth data where it maintains a minimum of 25 Mbps of downlink and 3 Mbps of uplink speed. With the growing number of connected smart devices and ever-increasing multimedia consumption, the demand and usage of Broadband internet are also growing fast. To meet this ever-increasing demand of the users, it is necessary to understand the usage pattern. On this aspect, the National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA) is playing a great role in collecting and maintaining the database for different broadband usage on various criteria. These criteria include the statistics and count of users based on various devices (smartphone, computer, tablets), different internet activities like streaming, emailing, or browsing, and also types of internet services they used- mobile data plan, wired internet service, or satellite internet service. The data of internet usage is also available based on population demographics. For example, we can know the total number of smartphone users has increased from 64% in 2017 to 67.9% in 2019. And the number of wearable device users increased from 8.2% to 12% in these two years. Information like this might be very useful in understanding the behavioral pattern and meeting the ever-increasing demand of the users. The dataset is publicly available here: Digital Nation Data Explorer | National Telecommunications and Information Administration (doc.gov) which can be presented in Map mode which presents the usage in percentage by the state whereas the chart mode allows presenting the data according to the percentage of the population, and estimated number of people or household. The understanding and study of the dataset would greatly help us in planning and designing the various networking services.

Reference: Digital Nation Data Explorer | National Telecommunications and Information Administration https://www.ntia.doc.gov/data/digital-nation-data-explorer#sel=emailUser&demo=&pc=prop&disp=both Accessed: 2022-03-07