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Report: Faster speeds help upstream usage hit the gas

February 17, 2026

Investments in higher-speed upstream plant can pay dividends for Fibre and DOCSIS broadband providers, according to the Q4 2025 edition of the OpenVault Broadband Insights (OVBI) report.

A first-ever point-in-time comparison of Fibre vs DOCSIS subscribers in a selected broadband system provided insights into usage when consumers have access to increased upstream speeds. OVBI reports that in the final quarter of 2025, subscribers on a fibre network with symmetrical speeds of 677 Mbps consumed 93 GB of upstream bandwidth. Fiber usage was 66 per cent higher than the 56 GB used by subscribers on the same system’s DOCSIS networks, which were provisioned at 17.3 Mbps, on average, in the upstream.

“As operators deploy higher-split architectures, expand usable spectrum, and leverage tools such as Profile Management Applications (PMA) to optimise modulation profiles and unlock additional upstream capacity, constraints on DOCSIS networks are steadily easing,” the report notes. “The Fibre comparison suggests that latent upstream demand already exists on DOCSIS networks and is likely to be activated as performance barriers are removed – resulting in rapid scaling of upstream consumption that further shifts.”

Overall, upstream usage continued to outpace all other metrics in 2025. The year-end average of 55.86 across fibre and DOCSIS platforms represented a 21.7 per cent year-over-year increase over the 45.9 record in 2024 and a 16.4 per cent increase over Q3 2025’s 47.98 GB. Other year-over-year findings included:

  • Average monthly usage rose 9.9 per cent to 767.4 GB, the first time average usage has exceeded 700 GB.
  • Average downstream usage of 711.4 in Q4 2025 itself exceeded the 698.2 average total usage at the end of 2024.
  • Median usage of 531.8 was 15.3 per cent higher than the 481.2 GB median recorded in Q4 2024, a rate of increase that was almost equal to the median increases of the previous two years combined (15.7 per cent).

The Q4 2025 OVBI also explores the need for providers to be mindful that steady percentage growth figures can mask progressively larger traffic volumes that place increased stress on provider networks. The report notes that even though Q4 2025 9.9 per cent growth was up only 1 per cent year-over-year, the absolute increase in traffic traversing broadband infrastructures averaged 69 GB per subscriber, compared to the 57 GB increase evidenced from Q3 2023 to Q4 2024.

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