Thanks to Ann Higgins for the heads up on the recent (Q2 2012) Calix report on rural broadband traffic.

The big news is that broadband in rural areas is getting faster – but it’s still a far cry from urban counterparts and the National Broadband Goals and definitely behind Minnesota goals speeds (10-20 Mbps down and 5-10 Mbps up)…

The most common peak downstream broadband rate consumed by endpoints in rural America was between 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps in Q2 2012. During the quarter, 55% of rural broadband subscribers received a maximum downstream broadband speed of 3 Mbps or less – approximately one-tenth of the U.S. peak downstream average published by Akamai in its most recent published ”State of the Internet” report. In fact, two-thirds of rural subscribers received downstream broadband speed that are slower than the target for the Connect America Fund (CAF) of 4 Mbps, and approximately 93% are below the ultimate CAF upstream target of 1.5 Mbps.

CivSource notes the dramatic growth highlighted in the report in rural areas lately…

The report shows that rural Internet traffic grew by 53% in the second quarter of this year. As CivSourcehas reported, the big three broadband providers – AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have all said consistently that there is no business case for rural broadband.

CivSource offers some background on the growth…

“Of particular interest this quarter was both the accelerating pace of Internet traffic in rural America quarter-over-quarter, and the fact that much of this increase was seen over copper networks,” said Miguel Alonso, Calix vice president of software products. “The combination of new copper technologies, a proliferation of video consuming devices, and content moving to the cloud creates a fertile ground for rapid increases in Internet traffic because copper is the most widely deployed access media in the rural U.S. Looking ahead to future quarters, we expect this trend to continue, and promise to provide deeper insights and analysis and we continue to further enhance the report by tracking more applications and endpoints across the U.S.”

Last quarter, I remember noting that while Calix reported downstream traffic far surpassed upstream traffic, one of the big drivers of upstream traffic was business use of the network. The same is reported this quarter…

…streaming media represented 62% of downstream Internet Traffic among U.S. rural service providers, and Internet browsing represents another 23% of downstream traffic. However, the largest consumer of upstream Internet traffic was business services, which generated approximately 30% of upstream traffic.

That’s actually a dip on upstream business services traffic; last month it accounted for 40 percent of the upstream traffic. Below is a chart on what business folks are doing:

Last quarter we noted that people who had fiber used more bandwidth; the same is true this month…

Our findings in rural America seem to be complementary – showing that broadband subscribers who are served by fiber generate more Internet Traffic than those with a copper access media. For the second quarter of 2012, service providers that delivered broadband services exclusively over fiber saw their subscriber endpoints generate 87% more downstream traffic and nearly 10% more upstream traffic than copperbased subscribers. Interestingly, the advantage of fiber over copper in the downstream continued its decline in Q2 2012, presumably due to the increased deployment of VDSL2 copper technologies, and complementary technologies such as bonding and vectoring.