Global Gigabit Growth

Some 219 million people worldwide have 1-Gig speeds available to them, or about 3% of the globe’s population, Viavi Solutions estimated in its latest Gigabit Monitor, a database that tracks those deployments.

In all, there are about 603 gigabit internet deployments, up 72% since June 2019, Viavi found.

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Not much has changed since then with respect to regions that are seeing the greatest rate of 1-Gig deployment growth.

In the May 2017 iteration of the report, North America achieved the highest growth rate, at 57%.

The composition of deployments using FTTP worldwide led all architectures by a wide margin, at 91.01%, followed by HFC networks (5.26%), Viavi said, noting that cellular, at 3.65% now, will rise as operators start to test and deploy 5G-based 1-gig fixed wireless services. Viavi said 25 mobile operators are currently lab-testing 5G, with about a dozen progressing to field trials.

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The study also found that there are 41 countries with gigabit internet service available in some form, with Singapore (95%) being the country with the highest percentage of the population covered, followed by South Korea (93%), Moldova (90%), and Portugal (64%).

Viavi updates the monitor regularly, basing it on its analysis of current and planned gigabit deployment data. The latest version also factors in population coverage estimates.