U.S. Broadband Industry Investment Reaches $92.6 Billion as Fiber-Fueled Networks Connect the Innovation Economy

America’s broadband providers invested $92.6 billion in U.S. communications infrastructure in 2025—up 3.4% from 2024 and the third-highest annual total since 2002. Cumulative investment now approaches $2.3 trillion since 1996 as consumer and business demand for faster, more sophisticated networks grows. In 2025, broadband providers pushed fiber deeper into more communities, expanding modern networks to meet demand that is growing in scale and changing in character. Average monthly broadband usage reached 767.4 gigabytes per subscriber by year’s end, up 9.9% from 2024. Looking ahead, Cisco projects that AI and agentic AI adoption could increase consumer-driven network traffic 6.6-fold by 2035. The directional flow of data is also changing fundamentally. For decades, networks were engineered primarily to deliver information downstream. AI, cloud synchronization and backup, and video sharing are driving growing volumes of data in the opposite direction: prompts, photographs, video, sensor readings, and other inputs move upstream for processing. In 2025 alone, upstream usage rose 21.7%, more than twice the growth rate of overall usage.