Telecom Lead America: Rural Internet traffic generated by rural consumers in America grew 53 percent quarter-over-quarter, as subscribers migrated to faster broadband speeds and streamed more Internet video.
Video streaming continued to dominate all Internet traffic in rural networks in Q2, representing over 62 percent of all downstream traffic.
Copper network endpoints, benefiting from new Calix technologies, like VDSL2 vectoring and bonding, generated a growing proportion of this traffic with an average of 6.5 gigabytes (GBs) of traffic in the period, up from 4.4 GB in the Q1 report.
According to Calix U.S. Rural Broadband Report, based on Internet traffic information drawn from over 65 U.S. communications service providers from the second quarter of 2012, 22.4 percent of end users generated more than 50 GB of traffic in Q2, up from 14.9 percent in the first quarter.
Video streaming continued to dominate all Internet traffic in rural networks in Q2, representing over 62 percent of all downstream traffic.
Copper network endpoints, benefiting from new technologies currently available in the Calix Unified Access portfolio, like VDSL2 vectoring and bonding, generated a growing proportion of this traffic with an average of 6.5 gigabytes (GBs) of traffic in the period, up from 4.4 GB in the Q1 report. Consistent with the overall growth in video consumption in rural America, the report findings also show 22.4 percent of end users generated more than 50 GB of traffic in Q2, up from 14.9 percent in the first quarter of the year.
In the second quarter, rural U.S. broadband subscribers saw an increase in peak broadband speeds from the previous quarter. Forty-five percent of this group received maximum peak downstream speeds of more than 3 Mbps, a 12 percent increase over Q1. Despite this improvement, two-thirds of rural broadband subscribers in Q2 experienced peak speeds that fell below the 4 Mbps target of the Connect America Fund. Of the remainder, 8 percent experienced peak broadband rates of over 10 Mbps, with the highest reported speeds reaching 1Gbps both upstream and downstream.
“Of particular interest this quarter was both the accelerating pace of Internet traffic in rural America quarter-over-quarter, and the fact that much of this increase was seen over copper networks,” said Miguel Alonso, Calix vice president of software products.
