World Broadband Association Predicts 50Gbps Home Broadband by 2030

The World Broadband Association (WBBA), which is a multilateral and industry-led association, recently published a new white paper that predicts residential broadband packages will be offering connection speeds of “up to” 50Gbps (Gigabits / sec) by 2030, while enterprise speeds will be “up to” 3.2Tbps (Terabits / sec).

The report (Next-Generation Broadband Roadmap), which acknowledges that its predictions for 2030 are highly “speculative given the timeframe” and will vary between locations (largely depending on the coverage of full fibre / FTTP networks), notes that the world is currently transitioning through the “BB5” (5th) generation of fixed broadband technologies (i.e. those offering speeds of 1Gbps to homes and 100Gbps to enterprises).

The next step after that is BB5.5, which will push residential speeds to 10Gbps and enterprises to 400-800Gbps. After that, we get to BB6 by around 2030, which is where those headline claims of up to 50Gbps for homes and up to 3.2Tbps for enterprises come into play.

“To take into account future network demands, the WBBA recommends that as the industry approaches 2030 and beyond, leading operators should be working toward networks that will be capable of this – residential speeds of up to 50Gbps and enterprise speeds of up to 3.2Tbps, providing fiber connectivity to individual sensors, being fully autonomous, having deterministic reliability with less than 1ms latency guaranteed, more energy efficiency per bit and very fast security breach detection and response (seconds),” said the WBBA.

At this point some of you will look at the figure of 50Gbps for homes and probably have a loud chuckle (especially if you live in a poorly served rural area – often the last ones to benefit), but it’s perhaps not as far-fetched as it may seem, since some other markets with more mature rollouts of Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology than the UK are already offering 10-20Gbps packages to home users.

The odd UK ISP, such as B4RN, also has a 10Gbps package for homes – provided you have deep pockets and are covered by their network. Many such ISPs are already in the process of rolling out 10Gbps capable networks, which we’d expect to become more common in the UK by 2030. But 50Gbps is, in our opinion, more likely to follow some years after 2030 over this side of the pond.

Huge leaps in domestic internet connectivity speeds are fairly common through the decades. Consider, for example, the introduction of 512Kbps (0.5Mbps) ADSL lines to the UK during 2000, which were a huge leap beyond the 56Kbps dialup modems that came before. Fast-forward to 2010 and FTTC packages with up to 40Mbps speeds and Cable with 100Mbps+ were becoming a thing, while today 1Gbps is becoming a common peak.

Admittedly, there’s always a question mark over whether or not most homes even need or could use multi-gigabit speeds (right now – most can’t), but that tends to change over time and the focus on top-speed isn’t as relevant as the benefits of the optical fibre cable itself – once fibre is in the ground then future speed upgrades are a lot easier. Likewise, just because a future package might offer you 50Gbps, that doesn’t mean to say you can’t still take a 1Gbps or slower tier and save money.

Suffice to say, it’s often difficult to envisage what the future holds when looking from today’s perspective, but broadband speeds always get faster – often ridiculously so – over time.