Here is a Cisco study that shows, no surprise, that video is eating the Internet star.
Average broadband speeds are set to double in the next two years, from around 25 Mbps (download) to 53 Mbps.
Much of the demand is from the increasing use of 4K video content. As more and more households cut the cord and start streaming high definition over the Internet, bandwidth use increases dramatically.
And the steadily increasing use of video in ads is contributing. There are few commercial Web sites (at least the ones I visit) that don't have pop up or embedded video ads. You can usually close them or turn them off, but it is incredibly annoying. One news site I visit has two pop up video ads on every page, so you can't really start reading the news until you change focus and close the ads.
And there are other bandwidth hogs. The Nest video doorbell sends video constantly to the Nest cloud servers. They keep it there for a certain period of time so you can go back and review it. On the "medium bandwidth" setting, the doorbell uses about 400 Gig a month. That's the equivalent of somewhere north of twenty-eight 4K HD movies a month....for your doorbell! If you put the doorbell in high resolution mode, the data increases to something around 600 Gig a month...for your door bell!!
Copper based cable networks, no matter what numbers they advertise, are going to be struggling as 4K HD TV and video doorbells become more common.
Fiber is still the future.