Care About Multi-Gig Internet Plans – Your ISP Should Too

The Evolution of Internet Speeds and the Need for Multi-Gig Connections

The Internet has come a long way since the early days of dial-up, with cable and fiber bringing seriously impressive speeds to the home. At one point, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) considered 25/4 Mbps as broadband, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) built out networks to enable it. But recently, the FCC increased the bar to 120/20 Mbps, forcing the ISPs to turn on extra equipment to meet the population's needs, with more than 90% of the U.S. population now having access to those speeds.

However, this is still not enough. Researchers say the average household of four can create up to half a gigabyte of data daily. That’s just created, uploaded to social platforms, sent as emails, stored in the cloud as documents, produced as search engine traffic or navigation results, etc. That’s before downloads are considered, whether they’re on video calls for work, or using 7 gigabytes of data per hour for streaming 4K Netflix shows (per person in the house, mind you), YouTube watching, gaming, or any other online activities. Working or studying from home uses around 600 gigabytes of data per month, necessitating more bandwidth.

While some areas of the country have access to multi-gig plans (those that offer 1 Gbps or more download speed), not everyone does, and that’s a problem for the way business and healthcare now work. The last decade saw our median broadband speed improve from 25th worldwide to a current sixth place, with 289.34 Mbps according to Ookla, but with the increasing move toward knowledge-based and AI work, it needs to improve some more, and fast.

The Importance of Multi-Gig Internet for the Future

Multi-gig Internet will be essential in the future. For some households, it’s essential now. It’s hard to imagine a world without the Internet, before online shopping, video conferencing, streamed videos, and cloud storage. It’s possibly harder to imagine what it will look like in ten or twenty years, with how rapidly technology evolves. But that’s the public-facing side of the Internet, the parts people use every day. Or should I say, know they use every day, because the backbone of the Internet is invisible to most users.

The parts that connect your home to the servers on which your content lives. The parts that your ISP gets you to subscribe to use. In the early days of the Internet, dial-up Internet use clogged up the phone lines. That led to the invention of DSL and fiber, which is where we are now. And fiber is fantastic, but more of it needs opening up for home users.

4K video streams use up to 25 Mbps on their own, while telework, such as from medical professionals, can use up to twice that amount. Multiply that by the number of people in your household, and the math doesn’t add up for the FCC’s conservative benchmark for broadband. I’m not saying everyone needs Multi-Gig connections right now, but that day is fast approaching, and both the ISPs and the regulatory bodies need to plan for its arrival.

The Current State of Multi-Gig Internet and ISP Rollouts

Multi-Gig Internet is the future. Some households might need Multi-Gig connections now. My partner and I work from home, our kid sometimes has virtual school, and we all stream video, browse, and perform other bandwidth-heavy tasks. Upgrading parts of my home network helps, but I’m still limited to 1 Gbps fiber, even if my ISP has said 2 Gbps is coming and local areas already have it. I know a faster plan doesn’t guarantee faster connections, but it means a better chance of one, as the ISP has to apportion capacity for the subscribed plan.

But even if you don’t fit in one of these categories, you still need your ISP to plan for Multi-Gig connections—even if you don’t plan on subscribing. The backhaul that the ISP uses for all its customers needs more capacity to accommodate everyone, and by starting now, there is less chance of the Internet slowing down for all its users.

The Slow Rollout of Faster Plans by ISPs

ISPs are slow-walking their rollouts of faster plans. If the infrastructure is already there, the speeds should be available. In 2019, the number of households with broadband over 1 Gbps was only 3%, according to the International Center for Law & Economics. Then the pandemic hit, and telework exploded as a result, leading to 1 Gbps+ subscribers being 33% of all households in 2023. That’s good news, and I hope that the trend of higher download speeds continues.

However, ISPs have been upgrading the last-mile infrastructure instead of the infrastructure between providers for years. This began an increasing strain on the core networks. And then AWS, Netflix, and other high-bandwidth users arrived, filling up the normally surplus provider-to-provider bandwidth, making the problem even worse. The era of slowed investment in fiber was over, and recent years have seen the ISPs playing catch-up with increased investment in infrastructure.

Is it expanding fast enough for Multi-Gig to reach more households? Not by my count. Smaller ISPs offer packages that outperform the larger players, and Multi-Gig availability from the big names has stagnated. I’ve been waiting for FiOS to give my area 2 Gbps speeds for years, while other fiber companies like Optimum, Google, and AT&T offer 5 or 10 Gbps packages. Still, the higher speeds are coming, and the always-connected future makes them necessary.

Challenges in Rural and Ex-Urban Areas

Ex-urban and rural areas still have some catching up to do. Ookla Speedtest data for 2024 shows that the digital divide between urban and rural broadband users widened. That’s not good news, and it gets worse when you consider that the number of states with 60% or more users experiencing 120/20 Mbps more than doubled since the beginning of 2024. That starts to paint a picture of ISP rollouts in urban areas being effective, while rural users might not have lost many (if any), but the divide kept increasing. Ookla says it might have been partly due to the Affordable Connectivity Program ending in 2024 because Congress didn’t apportion any funding, but that’s only one of the likely factors.

The U.S. is big, and laying fiber is expensive and difficult to remote areas. Satellite connections are faster than they used to be, but have an associated latency drawback that makes them fine for some tasks but not others, the ones that remote workers need to accomplish daily. And 5G might help, but that also needs tower building and fiber running to the towers, which takes time and resources. The Infrastructure Act passed by the last administration apportioned $42 billion to expand access to high-speed internet in underserved and rural areas. Still, it’ll take some time before those funds are put into laying fiber to smaller communities.

The Availability and Future of Multi-Gig Internet

Multi-gig Internet is available now, but it should be everywhere. Currently, Multi-Gig broadband of any type is limited to some locations and areas. Some ISPs are better than others at rolling out the plans, and I can’t wait for the rest to get with the plan and fix the backhaul so that consumers can get faster, more responsive Internet service.