Putting the Tech Elites' Whining in Perspective -- Swanson's new U.S. Bandwidth Boom Report

Kudos to Bret Swanson's excellent new research: "Bandwidth Boom: Measuring U.S. Communications Capacity from 2000-2008."

• For the first time, it measures and puts into perspective the incredibly explosive growth in American bandwidth capacity since the U.S. began strongly promoting facilities-based broadband competition and Internet infrastructure investment.
  • This research is new and interesting because it focuses on measuring supply-side bandwidth capacity, i.e. the fruit of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure investment, rather than just the traditional demand-side measure of data traffic or usage.   

This research also helps refute the constant whining and pessimism by the tech elites' that the U.S. is in the "digital dark ages," is falling behind the world in broadband, and in need of massive U.S. Government intervention in the Internet infrastructure market in order to make any progress.  

• The one page report summary is here.
• The full report is here.

In summary, Bret Swanson's Entropy Economics report found:

"Over the eight-year period:

• Total residential bandwidth grew 54x.

• Total wireless bandwidth grew 542x.

• Total consumer bandwidth grew 91x.

• Residential bandwidth per capita grew 50x.

• Wireless bandwidth per capita grew 499x.

• Total consumer bandwidth per capita grew 84x,

for a compound annual growth rate of 74%."

Impressive by any measure.