Fibre drives broadband bandwidth increase and price drop in Q4 2020
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Faye Sutton
| 06 February 2021
The last six months of 2020 saw a further drop in the average global price of fibre-based broadband tariffs, along with a significant increase in the average bandwidth, according to research by Point Topic.

point topicThe analyst firm, which studies tariffs every second quarter, collated data from more than 4,000 fixed broadband tariffs from 300 operators in more than 90 countries.

Other findings show that in Q4 2020, the average monthly charge for fibre connections decreased by 6.2%, compared with Q2 2020. At the same time, the price of cable broadband dropped by 1.2%. Driven by the lower cost of fibre, the average monthly charge for residential broadband services fell by 2.2% and stood at $89 PPP.

The average residential downstream bandwidth went up by 14.5% in Q4 2020, compared with Q2 2020, caused by the increase in bandwidth provided over cable and fibre networks. Average download speeds over cable increased by 15.1%, while average download speeds over fibre grew by 16.7%.

In terms of changes in the average cost of business broadband as well as average bandwidth, increase in fibre speeds had the largest effect. In Q4 2020, the combined average download bandwidth grew by 33.3% and stood at 288Mbps, caused by the boost in the average speed over cable and especially fibre, 9% and 38.6% respectively.

At the same time, the average combined cost per Mbps for business broadband packages dropped by 25.5%, caused to a large extent by fibre broadband connections becoming much cheaper. Compared with Q2 2020, the average cost per Mbps of fibre connections dropped by 28.9% while the cost of cable went down by 9.3%.