The pros and cons of 2Gbps home broadband
With 2Gbps home broadband now being marketed, we consider what households might do with all this bandwidth
In today’s age of gigabit home broadband, it’s easy to forget that the internet hasn’t always been an information superhighway.
In the 1990s, it was obvious that consumer demand for home internet access was outstripping the dial-up connections offered by contemporary modems.
In the Noughties, services like Midband and ASDL were half-hearted attempts at improving connection speeds still measured in kilobits per second.
Yet by the early 2010s, home broadband connections had increased by an order of magnitude.
Back in 2013, a housing estate in Carlisle was the first to receive 1Gbps broadband, courtesy of a local altnet called Grain.
Today, Grain are rolling out 2Gbps home broadband connections, as are full fibre rivals like Virgin Media, while Openreach are installing lines which support 1.8Gbps downloads.
However, it’s hard to imagine many scenarios where a 2Gbps domestic connection would be running at full capacity, in the way Nineties dial-up services tended to be.
So do modern households really need 2Gbps home broadband connections?
Getting the gig(abit)
A key argument in support of installing high-speed full fibre broadband lines is their future-proof nature.
High-capacity broadband connections already have to support the burgeoning number of Internet of Things devices around our homes, from video doorbells to smart speakers.
If you live with teenagers, their reliance on electronic devices (typically games consoles and tablets) places an additional strain on connections.
High-speed broadband ensures you can conduct a Zoom meeting with colleagues without an Alexa device or Netflix stream compromising call quality.
Speaking of Netflix, it was originally available in standard definition format only. When HD arrived, it required four times as much data.
Today, it’s possible to stream Netflix and other video on-demand services in 4K, which in turn contains four times as much data as HD.
By the next decade, the photorealistic 8K could be the gold standard for video content, once again containing four times as much data as 4K – and 64 times more data than SD.
A gigabit broadband connection ought to ensure even this quantum-leap in data volumes won’t tax your internet connection.
It’ll also be able to comfortably accommodate rising data from growing numbers of IoT devices and other nascent technologies like VR headsets.
A taxing issue
However, these are largely issues for the future.
Today, most people are content to stream videos in HD, and most UK households still don’t contain any IoT products like web-enabled thermostats or smart fridges.
Companies are slowly ushering staff back into the office, reducing the WFH burden on home broadband, and social media usage has been dwindling since 2022.
While 2025’s eight per cent rise in national internet data consumption was significant, it was comfortably handled by most existing broadband connections (though not ASDL lines).
After all, Ofcom figures from late last year suggest 21 per cent of UK consumers already have gigabit connections (or something close) in their homes.
Few of those connections are being taxed by a daily diet of email, doomscrolling and online gaming.
The installation of 2Gbps home broadband cables is certainly positive, since it’ll futureproof connections and pre-empt any need to replace older or slower cables in future.
Yet subscribing to a connection this fast seems unnecessary at present, particularly considering today’s dreadful economic conditions.
As such, many households may be better served by seeking to lower their current broadband speeds, rather than increasing them to the maximum their line will support.
