There was also a focus on finding the differences between three time periods: before the lockdown, during the lockdown and during the high peak 2020. The key findings are: Most US households are able to support video conferencing which is important for working from home, but there is still room for improvement. Only one in ten connections are facing limitations when consumers are using them to work from home. Often, the problems that occur are due to shared connections, the terminal device itself or when video platforms are used in addition to other applications. In general, the urban areas of the US show better results than the rural areas. The lower the requirements the better the results and especially when the requirements rise to a higher download speed, the differences between urban and rural areas becomes more evident.
COVID-19 has contributed to the fact that more and more people are working from home. It can be assumed that working from home will increasingly find its place in the world of work. We have used our proven crowdsourcing approach and gathered data from more than 690 million samples and over 3600 broadband lines between January and August 2020. For all tested requirements we found similar results: during the lockdown period the percentage of household meeting the requirements rose, while it usually declined slightly during the high peak period between June and August 2020.
Hakan Ekmen, CEO of umlaut Telecommunication, says: “In times of Covid-19, the digital infrastructure worldwide is facing challenges. In-home connectivity is important. With this background, the results of our evaluation of fixed broadband lines in the U.S. are encouraging. More than 90 percent of the lines in the U.S. easily meet the challenges of working from home. We see restrictions when video platforms with UHD streaming are used in addition to video conferencing.”
Please find the full USA fixed broadband analysis below and more information in our US Benchmarking section.
