Calix (News - Alert), Inc. recently released its Calix U.S. Rural Broadband Report. At least 50 U.S. communications service provider networks had been used to gather information regarding Internet traffic for the first quarter of 2012.

A fresh, comprehensive analysis of the maximum broadband speeds experienced by subscribers during the first quarter is included in the latest report.

Calix had released its first U.S. Rural Broadband Report in April 2011. Compared to the initial report, the number of applications being monitored has risen by 40 percent to over 180 Internet applications. The scale of the endpoints tracked across rural America has also increased to over 10,000 in the report.

Nearly two-thirds of broadband subscribers in the rural areas have apparently experienced downstream speeds of less than four Mbps, mandated by the Connect America Fund (CAF). The upstream speed of 1 Mbps, once again mandated by CAF, has also not been experienced by a majority of the rural broadband subscribers.

"As we continue to fine tune the Calix Rural Broadband Report, we are finding more powerful ways to help our service provider customers plan, manage and troubleshoot their networks,” said Miguel Alonso, vice president of Software Products at Calix. “Based on the overwhelming positive response from our inaugural report earlier this year, we are now tracking significantly more applications and endpoints – providing a much richer sample and more granular analysis. Moving forward, we will continue to expand and refine our data set to this report and shine an increasingly bright light onto the broadband needs of rural Americans."

A new level of insight into the broadband speeds experienced in rural America is also available in Calix’s report. Similar to the fourth quarter of 2011, video streaming was responsible for 64 percent of downstream Internet traffic on the rural broadband networks in the first quarter of 2012. There was, however, a considerable increase for upstream video streaming traffic in the first quarter of 2012, compared to the last quarter of 2011. Seventy percent of the downstream traffic in all-fiber networks was for video streaming.

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