Telecoms Leaders Say You Only NEED 25Mbps Broadband

A snap survey of members from the so-called Broadband 100 group, which rather boldly claims to bring together the “greatest minds from the Telecoms, Media and IT industries“, have perhaps unsurprisingly concluded that today’s homes only need broadband Internet download speeds of up to 25Mbps.

The group, which counts senior figures from Telstra, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and cable giant Liberty Global (Virgin Media) among its ranks, was established earlier this month in an effort to help boost collaboration with Government’s and within the industry itself.

Apparently their first meeting is due to take place at this year’s Broadband World Forum event in Amsterdam, which starts next week. But before that some 49 or so of their number managed to find the time to do a quick survey by answering a question on what kind of broadband speeds they felt CURRENT households might actually need.

The Broadband Need Survey Results

1. 25Mbps (42.9%)
2. 75Mbps (20.4%)
3. 150Mbps (18.4%)
4. 10Mbps (12.2%)
5. 1Gbps (4.1%)
6. 500Mbps (2%)

The complex issue of “need” and “demand” for different broadband speeds has been explored many times before on these pages, most recently in this article – Do We Really Need “Superfast” Broadband? Ultimately the conclusion will not be the same for everybody because we all have different requirements, although in an ideal world the underlying infrastructure should attempt to cater for the heaviest of economically feasible home usage.

In today’s market we’d say that 25Mbps is a reasonable expectation since that is able to cater for the vast majority of normal usage, although going forward there’s clearly a desire for even faster speeds. But right now it’s still a struggle for many people to get a stable performance of 25Mbps, yet the various deployment projects suggest that this won’t always be the case. We live in hope.

Crucially the survey is more interesting than your average poll because it reflects the thoughts of those who actually have to make the key decisions about current and future infrastructure. Credits to Cable for spotting the survey first.