Bandwidth Hawk
AI will continue to stimulate demand in ways we have yet to grapple with, or even to conceive. It’ll open new deployment opportunities.
By: Steven S. Ross, Broadband Communities
Artificial intelligence is this year’s driver of more bandwidth demand. AI is not a blip, though. It will continue to stimulate demand in ways we have yet to grapple with, or even to conceive.
A simple example
Videoconferencing for work, entertainment and education is increasing. Participation in a typical Zoom meeting consumes about 2 Mbps downstream and 0.5 Mbps up. But using an AI-driven note transcriber such as Otter roughly triples that. The transcriber becomes a participant, more than doubling the needed bandwidth!
As it captures the audio, the transcriber sends it to the cloud for decoding to text, and THEN gets the on-page text back! So two Mbps becomes about 5 Mbps per user downstream and 2 to 3 Mbps up, almost tripling bandwidth per live participant. Moving from HD (1920×1080 pixels) to 4K, the video portion’s demand quadruples as well.
So why would we not expect 20 Mbps per user, minimum, by 2035 in the US and 80 Mbps 20 years from now? That alone would mean the 100×20 Mbps Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) target could indeed be (barely) adequate a decade from now, but not beyond.
We might expect that some homes will have quite sophisticated semi-autonomous robots by then – at least for personnel care, help for disabled people and so forth. They’d be ubiquitous by 2045. Major home maintenance – painting, plumbing, roofing and so forth – could be robotic as well, leading to large transient peaks in home usage. Why? Because fairly fast computing will be required for such robotics, likely too fast for in-robot or home computers to handle.
Aside from smart farms, remote work in rural areas, AI everywhere, smart cars in urban areas, and remote education there are new twists in “home hospital care,” remote surgery, and new kinds of education for credentialing skilled workers. In the past few months, for example, there’s been a vast increase in social media home video production using AI.
In a bit more detail…
Evolution of existing content toward AI guidance
It has been repeatedly pointed out that today’s online users crave the internet for help and communication, not just gaming and content consumption. Google is still the king of visits, more than 100 billion monthly, worldwide. Google subsidiary YouTube has about half that many – and is in second place. WhatsApp is third, but each YouTube visit is only half as long as a WhatsApp visit. ChatGPT tops AI vendors, with more than 5 billion monthly visits as of this past winter when it passed Wikipedia and Reddit. USA rankings are different only in detail.
Technology need: More bandwidth and reliability, less latency.
Smart farms
It’s clear that traffic will jump. About a quarter of all farms are using “smart” satellite-driven technology to reduce consumption of energy, water, pesticides and other consumables. That proportion is increasing every year. Now, due to expulsion of undocumented farm workers and discouragement of existing “legal” workers, smart systems that replace labor are beginning to appear: Smart fruit and vegetable pickers, in-field produce packing and more.
Technology need: LEO and P2P is fine, ideally supported by nearby fiber. AI (mainly machine-learning, not generative) serves this sector now but needs more flexibility in use. Plants grow slowly …
Remote work, e-commerce and education
Expect these sectors to continue growing. The technology allows more direct-to-customer interactions, but reliability more than bandwidth is the key. One growth area overlooked by most: In-service or “on the job” training and certification in other than licensed trades such as plumbing or electrical work. This has been pioneered in southern Africa with some success and is now beginning to be adopted more by unions, trade schools, major employers, and local economic development agencies here.
Technology need: Remote conferencing and technical equipment – typically in existing school settings – to track student progress in tasks ranging from restaurant cooking to auto mechanics. Hybrid education for grade school and high school – mixed home and live classrooms – becomes common.
Home health care and remote surgery
Think small clinics and more extensive home care, rather than hospital settings. An enormous amount of human and veterinary surgery, for instance, is already done with robotic devices and compact tools allowing much smaller surgical wounds, simpler post-surgical care by non-specialist staff and much faster recovery. But today, in most cases, the surgeon controls the robot while standing or sitting next to the patient.
Technology need: A low-latency, redundant, ultra-reliable fiber-based remote hookup
Driverless vehicles
That refers to human transport and freight. As such vehicles move into more populated areas, including small town centers in rural areas, safety is enhanced by having the vehicles talk to one another. Fifty vehicles require as many as 2,500 channels.
Technology need: Wireless. Current cellular connection-establishment times, above 15 ms, are too long. But 6G by 2030 could fix that.
Cellular
In North America, aggregate smartphone usage, at about 50 GB a month, has been growing fast, even with augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) only in its infancy.
Technology need: Today’s – a leap from phone to in-home wifi to an internet connection – not a cell tower – will do most of the work if bandwidth to premise is adequate.
Recent growth patterns
Annual percentage growth in bandwidth needs has slowed since around 2015, when it was increasing around 40 percent per year in the aggregate and – for any one household or business – over 30 percent per year.
By 2020, that growth rate had slowed. Worldwide, monthly aggregate internet traffic still doubled from 2020 to 2025, from around 275 exabytes per month to 550. That works out to almost 20 percent aggregate annual growth rate. The COVID epidemic worldwide (2020 to 2023, with a long tail due to the slow move away from work-at-home) increased the number of households using the internet and also increased the amount of traffic per household.
That means that traffic per household did not increase as fast. Estimates vary, but 15-17% in 2024 was a reasonable consensus. Also, historically, homes have tended to use more bandwidth than apartments due to fewer inhabitants per household, but work-at-home and apartment-sharing by young adults has skewed that.
Don’t expect the growth rate to continue to slow.
Read more from the Bandwidth Hawk
Use BEAD savings for state loan guarantees (August 2025)
As of 2024, deployers in urban and suburban areas tended to calculate 700 to 1,000 gigabytes per month per home and no more than 700 GB/month for apartments, with 500 GB more typical.
Politicians are often surprised to learn that work or education from home is not the biggest traffic-generator. Gaming is, and AI is gaining fast.
Online multiplayer games can use up to 300 MB per hour or over 0.6 Mbps – a third the bandwidth of a video conference for work or education – although occasional overnight game downloads can run to 100 GB.
If your organization thinks in terms of aggregate demand
Conferences, emails, and calls for work or education consume anywhere from 20 to 200 GB per person per month. But again, the peak demand for any one user is now typically only about 8 Mbps and rising.
Video streaming uses a lot of bandwidth now – about 3 GB per hour, roughly the same as the typical zoom session – but 4K, compressed, is about 7 GB/hour or close to 20 Mbps on Netflix.
Deployers I’ve talked to are especially scared about resiliency issues (bad weather, pandemics, fires, floods, and more) rather than outright demand by new technologies. BEAD, as originally written, was supposed to include such considerations.
Deployers also worry less about bandwidth, and other performance metrics like latency, and more about reliability. Not a single wireless deployer I talked to worried about limitations on future spectrum sales. As unlicensed spectrum users, they think they are immune. Yet, the pending one is the last major spectrum sale from the federal government. There are no other frequencies available as a matter of physics.
The spectrum auction should have driven more deployments to point-to-point “unlicensed” spectrum (raising costs for future cellular expansion, by the way, unless close fiber allows more access points to allow redundant spectrum use) but that prediction has not played out in BEAD deployment wins submitted by states. It also has had an uneven effect on fiber competitive economics – fiber gains in the East, loses in the West.
Meanwhile, low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites become better with more spectrum, but more expensive to operate.
The bottom line
The rise of AI-driven software, both for businesses and consumers, requires constant internet access for real-time processing, significantly boosting bandwidth demand. But AI active data centers must be served by fiber trunks, and that opens new deployment opportunities.
My verdict
While Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, doing President Trump’s bidding, has muddled BEAD, he hasn’t killed the rural broadband dream. But not for lack of trying.
You can reach Steve Ross, the Bandwidth Hawk, at steve@bbcmag.com.