New Data Confirm Internet Isn't Broken

When the Federal Communications Commission ended the Obama Administration’s failed, two-year experiment with these heavy-handed regulations back in 2017, Title II advocates guaranteed that doing so would literally break the Internet.  They claimed that broadband prices would spike, that you would be charged for each website you visited, and that the Internet itself would slow down. None of this was true. Broadband speeds increased, prices decreased, competition intensified, and years of record-breaking infrastructure builds brought millions across the digital divide.  Here is the latest data:  

• Median fixed download speeds in the U.S. have increased by more than five-fold or approximately 430% since 2017, according to Ookla data.
• Median mobile download speeds have increased by more than seven-fold or approximately 647% since 2017, according to Ookla data.
• The United States has leapfrogged other countries since 2017 and now ranks among the highest in the world for fixed, mobile, and 5G broadband speeds, according to Ookla data.
• In real terms, the prices for Internet services have dropped by about 9% since the beginning of 2018.
• On the mobile broadband side alone, real prices have dropped by roughly 18% since 2017.
• And for the most popular broadband speed tiers, real prices are down 54%, and for the fastest broadband speed tiers, prices are down 55%, over the past 8 years.
• In the four years following the 2017 Title II repeal, the percentage of Americans with access to two or more high-speed, fixed ISPs increased by about 30%—up from 229 million to approximately 295 million, according to FCC measures.
• Entirely new players and forms competition have also emerged since 2017, including a new generation of high-speed LEO satellite services plus fixed wireless and 5G offerings.
• In 2022, broadband builders laid over 400,000 route miles of fiber, a more than 50% increase over 2016 numbers.  In 2023, fiber was stretched to 9 million new U.S. households, setting a new all-time record for fiber-to-the-home deployments in a single year.
• The number of outdoor small cell nodes has increased by over four-fold from 100,000 in 2017 to 466,850 by year end 2023, according to industry data.
• Record breaking buildout was supported in part by record breaking new investment. In 2022, the broadband industry invested a record $102.4 billion in U.S. communications infrastructure, which represents a 21-year high for investment and a 19% year-over-year increase, according to industry data.