The debate over the adequacy of broadband in the United States — compared, at least, to parts of Europe and Asia — has centered on speed and numbers of users. In some cases, the US hasn’t stacked up too well. But when actual broadband use is measured, the US comes out much better. “There’s this argument about whether the broadband networks in the U.S. are good enough,” Jonathan Banks, senior vice president of law and policy at USTelecom, told IDG Connect. “A lot of people compare network capacity to Europe or Japan. You may have a lot of capacity, but if people don’t use it, what does it mean?”
According to IDG, USTelecom looked at broadband use in North America, Europe and Asia, and found average U.S. consumers transfer about 14.2 gigabytes worth of Web content to their Internet devices a month. South Koreans were by far the greatest users of bandwidth per month, at 24.5GBs, followed by France, at 14.3GBs, and then the US. Germans averaged 12.9GBs per month, Brits averaged 11.9GBs, and the Japanese averaged just 9.9GBs.
“The average broadband connection worldwide generates 11.4GBs of Internet traffic per month, or 375 megabytes per day, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, upon which the USTelecom study is based,” IDG reports. “The average broadband user, then, generates traffic about equal to downloading 3,000 text e-mails per day or 100 MP3 music files per day.”