It’s not more bandwidth that users need
by William Webb, spectrum.ieee.org, 10 Feb. 2025
These heretical questions are worth asking, because industry bandwidth tracking data has lately been revealing something surprising: Terrestrial and mobile-data growth is slowing down. In fact, absent a dramatic change in consumer tech and broadband usage patterns, data-rate demand appears set to top out below 1 billion bits per second (1 gigabit per second) in just a few years.
This is a big deal. A presumption of endless growth in wireless and terrestrial broadband data rates has for decades been a key driver behind telecom research funding. To keep telecom’s R&D engine rooms revving, research teams around the world have innovated a seemingly endless succession of technologies to expand bandwidth rates, such as 2G’s move to digital cell networks, 3G’s enhanced data-transfer capabilities, and 5G’s low-latency wireless connectivity.
