Chicago and California are the United States’ top Gigabit city and state, according to research from telecom equipment maker VIAVI. The data comes from the VIAVI Solutions Gigabit Monitor database and is summarized in a report titled “The State of US Gigabit Deployments.”
VIAVI – formerly JDSU – found that Gigabit services are available to more than 8.5 million people in California and more than 6 million people in The Windy City.
Following the Top Gigabit City and State
The rest of the top ten states are Illinois (about 6.5 million), Colorado (5.2 million), Georgia (4.2 million), Florida (3.4 million), Utah (2.4 million), New York (2 million), Tennessee (2 million), Texas (1.2 million) and Michigan (976,000).
On the city list, Chicago is followed by Atlanta (about 3.8 million), Denver (2.3 million) New York (2 million), Nashville (1.26 million), San Francisco (1.2 million), San Jose (1.1 million), Detroit (922,000), Fresno (586,000) and Chattanooga (506,000).
The growth of Gigabit connectivity raises a host of challenges. “While the overall picture of the United States’ Gigabit health is robust, such a jump in connectivity speed comes with significant delivery challenges,” said Sameh Yamany, the Chief Technology Officer of VIAVI Solutions in a press release. “In particular, service and field technicians need to acquire more complex skills with additional training to be able to test and troubleshoot high-speed connectivity issues. . . Service providers need to take steps to ensure that their network testing and maintenance practices allow them to follow through on the Gigabit promise.”
Overall, according to VIAVI, 57.5 million consumers in the United States have Gigabit services available to them. That’s the highest number in the world. The U.S. is followed by South Korea, Turkey and Canada in terms of numbers of people with gigabit availability.
The 57.5 million number for the U.S. represents 18% of the population. Although the number of people connected is lower, several countries have a higher percentage of people with gigabit availability, including Singapore (95%), South Korea (93%), Moldova (90%) and Portugal (64%).
If VIAVI’s data and data released last week based on FCC research both are accurate, Gigabit connectivity has jumped during the past year. The USTelecom and CensusNBM, working with data from the FCC, estimated that 10% of housing units in the United States could reach 1 Gbps speeds as of 2016.
Image courtesy of flickr user Sean MacEntee.
