Calix report shows steady increase in rural Internet traffic

In news that will not shatter the earth, the Calix (NYSE: CALX) U.S. Rural Broadband Report showed that video streaming represented over 62 percent of all downstream traffic on rural networks in the second quarter.

Calix also noted that copper network endpoints that benefit from new technologies like VDSL2 vectoring and bonding "generated a growing proportion of this traffic" with the total going up to 6.5 gigabytes in the second quarter compared to 4.4 GB in the first.

"Consistent with the overall growth in video consumption in rural America, the report findings also show 22.4 percent of end users generated more than 50 GB of traffic in Q2, up from 14.9 percent in the first quarter of the year," a Calix news release said.

Other report findings highlighted by the company include the fact that the Midwest is now the leading generator of upstream streaming media traffic, coming in 12 percent higher than the national average; the Northeast leads in generating online shopping traffic and the upstream traffic for this application is 41 percent higher than the national average; and the Southeast is the strongest gaming region with traffic 55 percent above the U.S. average.

Broadband speeds were also up—thanks, no doubt, to improvements in copper technology available to rural users--with 45 percent of rural users seeing speeds of more than 3 Mbps. This, Calix said, is a 12 percent speed increase over the first quarter but still "two-thirds of rural broadband subscribers in Q2 experience ed peak speeds that fell below the 4 Mbps target of the Connect America Fund."

Miguel Alonso, Calix vice president of software products, credited a "combination of new copper technologies, a proliferation of video consuming devices, and copper moving to the cloud" as reasons for the increased broadband consumption, noting "copper is the most widely deployed access media in the rural U.S."

For more:
- Calix issued this news release

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