Quantifying the broadband access bandwidth demands of typical home users

We take a closer look at the probable demand for bandwidth that is presumed to motivate the deployment of new broadband access technologies. We construct plausible estimates of what a 'typical home' might need given two different service provision scenarios – managed bandwidth and best-effort statistical multiplexing. We estimate a household of five people requires between 58 and 113Mbit/sec if bandwidth is managed on a per-application basis. If statistical multiplexing is used, the same family's bandwidth requirements jump to between low hundreds of Mbit/sec to almost a Gbit/sec.