How Fast Does Internet Speed Grow?

Xah Lee, 2006-12-30, …, 2012-04-16

Since 1990, hard disk storage capacity doubles in about every 1 year, computing speed doubles by about every 2 years. What about internet speed?

Here's my internet connection speed history:

kbit/s = 10^3 bits per second.

How Fast Net Speed Grow?

According to Wikipedia, it's 50% faster per year. The formula is then c*1.5^n where n is number of years, and c is a constant. This seems pretty accurate. Assuming in 1990 it's 1.2 kbits/s. We have:

{{1990, 1.2},
{1992, 2.7},
{1994, 6.075},
{1996, 13.6688},
{1998, 30.7547},
{2000, 69.198},
{2002, 155.696},
{2004, 350.315},
{2006, 788.209},
{2008, 1773.47},
{2010, 3990.31},
{2012, 8978.19},
{2014, 20200.9},
{2016, 45452.1},
{2018, 102267.},
{2020, 230101.}}

• Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth (1998-04-05, 2010) By Jakob Nielsen. @ www.useit.com…

Digital Audio Speeds

MP3

• 32 kbit/s — AM radio quality
• 96 kbit/s — FM radio quality
• 160 kbit/s — low quality music mp3 from web
• 224 〜 320 kbit/s — VBR to highest MP3 quality. 320 kbit/s comparable, virtually indistinguishable to CD quality.

Other audio

• 0.8 kbit/s — minimum necessary for recognizable speech (using speech codecs)
• 2.15 kbit/s — minimum bitrate available through the open-source Speex codec
• 8 kbit/s — telephone quality (using speech codecs)
• 32-500 kbit/s - lossy audio as used in Ogg Vorbis
• 256 kbit/s — Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) MP2 bit rate required to achieve a high quality signal
• 400 kbit/s 〜 1,411kbit/s — lossless audio as used in formats such as Free Lossless Audio Codec, WavPack or Monkey's Audio to compress CD audio
• 1,411.2 kbit/s — CD

Digital Video Speeds

• 16 kbit/s — videophone quality (minimum necessary for a consumer-acceptable “talking head” picture using various video compression schemes)
• 128 — 384 kbit/s — business-oriented videoconferencing quality using video compression
• 1.15 Mbit/s max — VCD quality (using MPEG1 compression)
• 3.5 Mbit/s typ — Standard-definition television quality (with bit-rate reduction from MPEG-2 compression)
• 9.8 Mbit/s max — DVD (using MPEG2 compression)
• 8 to 15 Mbit/s typ — HDTV quality (with bit-rate reduction from MPEG-4 AVC compression)
• 19 Mbit/s approximate — HDV 720p (using MPEG2 compression)
• 24 Mbit/s max - AVCHD (using MPEG4 AVC compression)
• 25 Mbit/s approximate — HDV 1080i (using MPEG2 compression)
• 29.4 Mbit/s max — HD DVD
• 40 Mbit/s max — Blu-ray Disc (using MPEG2, AVC or VC-1 compression)

Device/Protocol Speeds

Devices i had personal experienced since i started to use computer in 1991:

Reference:

• Bit rate
• List of device bandwidths
• Moore's law