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CenterFuse Broadband Feasibility Report Within these numbers are also what OpenVault calls extreme power users, which is households that use more than 2 terabytes of data per month. That's grown from 0.3% of households in 2019 to 1% of all households at the end of the third quarter of 2020. The demand for faster broadband products has also leapt upward due to the pandemic. At the end of September 2020, the percentage of homes subscribing to gigabit data products jumped to 5.63% of homes, up from 2.8%at the end of 2019 and up from 1.9% in 2018. OpenVault says that 25%of US homes subscribe to speeds of 200 Mbps or faster at the end of September 2020, up from only 13% a year earlier. The OpenVault data also validates what's been reported widely by ISPs—that the pattern of broadband usage is changing by time of day. In the recent past the peak period for residential broadband usage—the busy hour—was always in the evenings. During the pandemic, the amount of usage in the evenings has remained flat and all of the increased usage came during the daytime as employees and students used broadband and video conferences to function. OpenVault says that usage peaked in the third week of March 2020. It will be interesting going forward to see the how home usage changes. OpenVault doesn't have any better crystal ball than the rest of us, but they are predicting that broadband usage will never return to the historic patterns. They predict that a lot of people will continue to work from home, meaning increased broadband demand during the day. They believe there will be continued pressure on the upload data paths. People who have learned to videoconference during the recent months are likely to continue that practice in the future. Companies and employees that realize they can be productive at home are likely to work more from home, even if only on a part-time basis. These various statistics are a clear indication that the FCC should be periodically increasing the definition of broadband. The agency looked at broadband speeds in a docket in 2018 and concluded that they were going to keep the definition at 25/3 Mbps. However, there was a lot of compelling filings in that docket that argued that the definition of broadband should be 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps. The point of this section of the report is that we can't get hung-up on the FCC's definition of broadband when looking at the broadband gap. Practically every home that uses broadband would acknowledge that they download and upload a lot more data today than they did just a few years ago. It's also important to look towards the future when considering broadband needs. For example, if an ISP builds a new broadband solution today, that solution should be prepared to handle the broadband requirements a decade from now. Consider the following chart that predicts broadband needs moving forward. This applies the 21%historic annual growth rate for bandwidth to the broadband speed predicted by cisco for 2020. Forward predictions are always criticized for being too aggressive, but when considering that the need for broadband has been growing at roughly the same rate since 1980, it's not a big stretch to predict broadband needs into the future. Download S eeds in Me abits/ Second 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 65 79 95 115 139 169 204 247 Page 52