The FCC has released its annual Internet access connections report, based on collected FCC Form 477 data, which covers Internet access connections providing over 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in at least one direction. The report, which summarizes the information collected about telephone services as of June 30, 2016, contains “data on total and residential Internet access connections by downstream and upstream speed, by technology, by geography, and over time.” It also contains nationwide statistics, state-level data, data on the subscribership differences among counties and census tracts, an analysis of the correlations between subscribership ratios and various demographic measures, and maps depicting the number of fixed connections per 1,000 households by census tract and the number of fixed providers by census block. Among the findings highlighted in this report are the following: (1) the total number of Internet connections increased by about 8% between June 2015 and June 2016 to 369 million; (2) most of the growth in total Internet connections is attributable to increased mobile Internet access, which increased 10% year-over-year to 256 million in June 2016, while the number of fixed connections grew to 104 million, up 4% from June 2015; and (3) as of June 2016, with respect to downstream speeds, 5% of fixed connections (or about 5 million connections) were slower than 3 Mbps downstream, 15% were at least 3 Mbps downstream by slower than 10 Mbps, 23% were at least 10 MBPS downstream but slower than 25 Mbps, 39% were at least 25 Mbps but slower than 100 Mbps, and 18% were at least 100 Mbps.
