Agents keep sending context, files, screenshots and tool calls upstream.
Today home upload grows 16-19% a year. OpenVault measured upstream usage growth of 15.9% (2023-24), 17.9% (2024-25) and 19.2% (2Q26).
Ericsson's high case is 30.8% a year: uplink 5× from 2025 to 2031 (Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2026, full report, not the press release). It is the top of three scenarios and a simulation of one dense city area. The medium case is 3× (20.1% a year). Extending it to 2035 and to homes is a Mach33 assumption. The 50% slider max is a Mach33 stress setting above Ericsson's high case.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts (Q2 2026 call): upstream traffic grew 2.5× the downstream growth, "And that's being driven, I think, by rapidly changing AI queries."
Operators build networks for the busiest hour. Congestion hits at peak, so we multiply average demand by a peak factor.
Cisco's 2009 usage study measured the peak hour at about 1.16-1.2× the average hour. Cisco's 2018 forecast put the busiest hour at 6× the average by 2022.
Above 6× is a Mach33 assumption: one home's agent bursts can run hotter than the network-wide average.
At Ericsson's medium case (20.1% a year), 2035 lands at 0.8% (6× peak) to 3.7% (10×): 4% or less. Ceilings are today's measured line speeds, held static.
Read the full State of Connectivity analysis →Upload ceiling (speeds)
Homes
- European Commission JRC, GHS-POP R2023A population grid (households = Mach33 estimate) R2023A
Demand base and growth today
Agent-driven growth
- Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2026 (full report, pp. 24-25): AI uplink scenarios for a simulated dense urban area, Medium 3× and High 5× by 2031 vs 2025; global mobile traffic forecast to roughly double Jun 2026
- Ericsson press release: uplink "three times higher or more" by 2031; 43 of 55 operators saw uplink outgrow downlink Jun 2026
Peak hour
Fixed and mobile
How we calculate it
- Ceiling per home = fast-fixed share × cell fixed average upload + rest × cell mobile average upload. Fast-fixed share = population-weighted share of Ookla fixed tests averaging ≥100 Mbps. H3 resolution-5 cells (~253 km²).
- Peak demand = 58.2 GB/mo × peak multiple, grown at the slider rate from 2026. A cell is past its ceiling in the first year peak demand exceeds it.
- Shares are of homes with enough test data (about 84% of homes). Ranking by share lists countries with 1M+ homes.
- At Ericsson's high case (30.8%, 10×), Korea, Spain and France stay under 0.5% by 2035, and Nigeria and Bangladesh are tied for third by homes affected.
Open question: is our max too low?
- We think this is the biggest unknown in the model. Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman and Elon Musk all describe fast-rising demand for AI compute. Google's monthly tokens rose more than 20× in a year. Nokia says AI apps could push mobile uplink growth as high as 70% a year. Nobody we've found ties that token or compute growth to home upload usage, which grows about 19% a year in the US (OpenVault). Our 50% max is a stress test above the highest sourced case (Ericsson, 31%). Real demand could run higher or lower. This is our read, not a model result.
- Nokia white paper: AI apps "can lead to an uplink traffic growth of 10 to 70%" 2025
- Alphabet Q3 2025, Sundar Pichai: over 1.3 quadrillion monthly tokens, "more than 20x growth in a year" Oct 2025
- NVIDIA GTC keynote transcript, Jensen Huang: agentic AI and reasoning need "easily 100 times more" computation than expected a year earlier Mar 2025
- Satya Nadella on Jevons paradox: AI use will "skyrocket" as it gets cheaper (Fortune) Jan 2025
- Sam Altman, "Abundant Intelligence": "Growth in the use of AI services has been astonishing" Sep 2025
- Elon Musk: xAI targets 50 million H100-equivalent GPUs within five years (Tom's Hardware) Jul 2025
Disclaimers
- US proxy baseline (OpenVault cable average) applied to every country.
- We assume agent demand grows the same everywhere.
- Ceilings are static: today's per-line measured speeds (Ookla Q3 2026), not network capacity. No upgrades are modeled. Mobile is an upper bound, since speed tests ignore tower sharing.
- Ericsson's 5× is a dense-city simulation, extended to 2035 and to homes by Mach33.
- Excludes the 16% of homes in cells with too few tests. Counts are households, not people.
- Informational only, provided as is. Mach33 isn't liable for decisions based on it. Commercial or premium use: Terms of Service.