This seems more likely than Charter, ATT, et al. investing massive amounts of cash into their networks. I think there would be massive PR campaign if the actually almost doubled available bandwidth in a year. The capacity was always there, they just needed to be paid in order to open it up. I upgraded from 200/10 to 600/35, they just flipped a switch.
Yep. Service providers didn't ramp up their investments at all into telecom equipment providers during covid, which is impressive. They just had good capacity that was never fully used. They're going slowly on the whole 5G thing now as they don't expect customers to be ready for massive price hikes to their plans. Ultimately the capacity of customers (individuals and businesses) to pay is what drive those investments, regardless of how much everyone claim to need ever increasing bandwidths.
It is both. This number is probably driven by people that are upgrading plans. But the telcom companies are spending billions on expanding infrastructure. Look at the capex numbers for any of the big companies. A lot of it is 5G, but wired as well.
