The research firm defines “true” broadband as broadband to the home with aggregate downstream capability of a minimum of 10 megabytes, in contrast with “the typical 384 kilobytes downstream that service providers offer today.”
Gartner Dataquest said it used the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) historical tracking of the relationship between the GDP per capita and telephone penetration in each country, and applied the same correlation principle of “teledensity” and GDP per capita to create a broadband model.
It claims that the development of broadband at 10 megabyte-connections to the consumer would create significant growth in goods and services.
According to Gartner, however, this growth could only be created by the development of a new network, which would demand “continuous upgrade of communications equipment, driving years of growth in user devices as well as network hardware.”
Gartner added that, while the rewards of a true broadband environment are substantial, its development would require “enormous investment” and “the physical deployment would take years.”