FCC Moves Slowly To Update Definition Of Broadband To Something Still Pathetic
from the keeping-the-bar-at-ankle-height dept
For decades, the FCC has maintained an arguably pathetic definition of “broadband,” allowing the telecom industry to under-deliver substandard access. And despite some new rhetoric from the agency under Biden, that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.
Broadband was originally defined as any 200 kbps connection. In 2010, that pathetic definition was changed to a slightly less pathetic definition: 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream. In 2015, it was changed again to a slightly more reasonable but still pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream, where it resides today.
For eight years straight everybody from consumer groups to the GAO told the FCC that the sluggish 25/3 definition didn’t reflect modern standards, and let the telecom industry get away with providing substandard service. The Trump FCC’s response: to propose lowering the definition even further.
Recently the Biden FCC proposed finally updating the definition of broadband to something more modern. A recent Notice of Inquiry (NOI) issued by the agency indicates they’re looking at 100 Mbps downstream, and 20 Mbps upstream as the new standard:
“we seek comment on the appropriate standards for evaluating the physical deployment of fixed and mobile broadband service, including proposing to increase our benchmark for fixed broadband download speed to 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and the upload speed to 20 Mbps.”
They’re just pushing the idea and seeking public comment. An actual update of the definition of broadband is still some distance away.
Originally, Senators had prodded the FCC to impose a cleaner, symmetrical 100 Mbps (upstream and downstream) standard definition of broadband. But after lobbying from cable and wireless companies that can’t consistently deliver 100 Mbps upstream, the definition was weakened to help companies pretend their services are more cutting edge than they actually are.
The FCC’s NOI asks if the agency should maybe consider imposing a speed standard of 1 Gbps downstream, 500 Mbps upstream, but industry watchers like Doug Dawson correctly note that it’s hard to take the agency seriously on that front:
“Setting a future theoretical speed goal is a feel-good exercise to make it sound like FCC policy will somehow influence the forward march of technology upgrades. This is exactly the sort of thing that talking-head policy folks do when they create 5-year and 10-year broadband plans.”
Big ISPs have of course fought any effort to improve U.S. broadband speed metrics every step of the way. Keeping the definition of broadband set at ankle height helps obfuscate the industry’s ongoing failure to deliver next-generation broadband in a timely basis despite billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory favors that were all supposed to help deliver uniform broadband access.
It works in concert with the FCC’s historically shitty broadband maps to obfuscate market failure, limited competition, and the perils of concentrated monopoly power. Better data and higher standards would highlight widespread market failure prompting calls to hold concentrated telecom power accountable, and we certainly wouldn’t want that.
When it comes to telecom policy, the GOP operates in absolute synchronized lockstep with widely disliked companies like AT&T and Comcast. The lion’s share of Democrats, in contrast, like to put on a good show that they care about the consumers in this equation, but the vast majority of proposals they push still wind up being long overdue and largely decorative.
Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, gigabit, high speed internet, telecom
Comments on “FCC Moves Slowly To Update Definition Of Broadband To Something Still Pathetic”
“100 down, 20 up”
So uh…. what all my friends and I had here in the UK back in…. 2001?
Re:
Where, in a university dormitory? VDSL could do 55 down and 3 up in those days; DOCSIS, 40 down and 10 up, but I hear DOCSIS was never common in the UK.
It wasn’t till 2006 that any consumer-level “last mile ISP” standard supported those speeds. In theory; to this day, that downstream speed remains optimistic for unbonded VDSL.
The pathetic thing about this is that my ISP offers (at minimum) 350 Mbps symmetrical. And that’s about $49. Which considering the prices of companies like comcast or AT&T is crazy good. Their highest is 1 Gbps symmetrical, which is $89. And everything is fiber. So it’s absolutely, completely hilarious to me when Comcast/AT&T claim that they can’t deliver these (if not better) networks with $40-$80 billion-dollar budgets when my ISP, which has an income of probably around $300 million or so, is able to offer these speeds. I can’t wait until our generation takes over and says, to all of these big monopolies, “fuck you, we’re taking back all the funding we’ve ever given you, pay up”. Then we’ll see how fast they complete all the upgrades they’ve been promising for decades.
Re:
Nice one
Re:
Other countries are rolling out 10 Gbit/s (Korea, Japan) and even 25 Gbit/s services (in Switzerland, the ISP “init7” offers that symmetrically). The standards for this stuff are upward of a decade old now.
America’s ambition? Maybe 1 Gbit/s, non-symmetrical, as was state-of-the-art 20 fucking years ago. (The first GPON standard was published in 2003, around the time that gigabit ethernet switches become affordable.)
Re:
No, those big monopolies will just respond with multi-million dollar lawsuits. They will go to any means necessary to keep the public’s hands off of their ill-gotten wealth. They are essentially a legal Mafia.
Re: Re:
Which just makes this even worse. IMO they need to be shut down. Or nationalized, though somehow I feel that nationalized ISPs would probably be even worse (you know how slow the government is). So I say shut down the big three and let community broadband initiatives do the rest — clearly they can do it better, and if American wants to be “the best”, then everybody should be getting 50-100 Gbps symmetrical, if not maxing out our link speeds on ethernet/wi-fi cards completely because the network is faster than the card can deliver.
Re: Re: Re:
Private service over government infrastructure is the way to do it. Governments can sometimes be very fast: my city runs its own drinking water network, and when a water-main fails they usually have workers there within the hour. The same’s true if important transportation or electrical infrastructure is damaged.
Granted, governments might not be quick to upgrade their equipment to get the highest speeds, but the way to mitigate that is to let private ISPs provide their own equipment. They just need to have access to (future-proof non-shared) fiber, running from homes to a small number buildings at which they can lease space. The government should still provide its own network equipment there, for ISPs that can’t yet afford the capital costs to run their own (but maybe they get “only” 10 Gbit/s instead of 100, and maybe it slows down a little during peak times).
In this way, we should see a return to the Internet-access competition of the 1990s. Before we got “broadband”, many of us were just buying service from some person who’d been running a local BBS and thought they’d see if anyone else was interested in this Internet thing.
As for what to do about existing ISPs and infrastructure: worst case, we can just ignore them and leave them to die like cable TV companies. There’s not much they can sue about then.
Any definition of BROADBAND is arbitrary.
It’s pathetic for any citizens of a free society to expect government bureaucrats to dictate their subjective opinion to the nation.
Re:
You like being served shit internet for shit prices, then?
Re: Re:
He even asks “Please sir, can I have some more?”
Re:
The US is not a free society. Government bureaucrats are not dictating to Americans, corporations are.
Broadband used to mean something in the tech world, now like most everything it is a bullshit term used by marketing to lie to the public.
Re:
What lie? “A broadband signalling method is one that handles a wide band of frequencies. ‘Broadband’ is a relative term, understood according to its context.”
It’s the modern use of the term to mean “fast” that’s bullshit. DOCSIS was the first form of fast internet access to become popular in the English-speaking world, so people equated the two (and DOCSIS remains technically broadband no matter how much your service sucks). But modern Ethernet, for example, is baseband, and is much faster than its older broadband counterparts (like 10BROAD36) and most so-called “broadband” internet services.
Expect anything else?
WE HAVE A GOV. that hasnt figured out that ITSELF is at the top of the food chain.
I dont think, ANYONE in office NOW was in office or BORN before they Dropped the Corp tax rate in 1969.
Because Before that point the gov. had a big problem..TO MUCH MONEY.
But also, that a Gov. created SERVICE was Run by the GOV. very cheaply. Such as Many utilities, where the infrastructure WAS CREATED by the gov., NOT a CORP.
But all that was GIVEN to Corps, as Someone MAde the point that Gov. Should NOT compete with Companies.
They went so far with that idea, that Commissaries on Military stations were Soon Given up for PROFIT CORPS. Rather then cheap foods and other goods for military families. NOW they pay Almost the same prices.
But thats Nationalism?? isnt it?
As the services they Provide PAY for our taxes. And we can see those services.
The Funny think with the FCC. Is that they Act Like they have NEVER had Internet, and dont know HOW any of that works.
Wonderful. Agency in charge of something it has NO Idea of how it works.
About as Bad as Almost ALL of the other federal agencies, that have been CUT BACK TO THE NUB/CORE/Nothing left, that they can hardly do the JOB they were/ARE created for.
Bandwidth Symmetry
OB DISC: I’ve ran two ISPs. Neither was a telco or broadband services provider. We used THOSE companies to deliver our 100% uptime IP services.
Discussion of bandwidth assymetry is begging the question of why we allow the broadband companies to deny us proper service, and assumes this is a fact of the technology or the service. It is not. If you’re TL;DRing, jump to “Analogy World” below.
The dichotomy of offering a service but only delivering some smaller portion of it for an ever-increasing price INSTEAD OF providing the customer with what he/she wants is how these businesses thrive. The cost of bandwidth is exactly the same on the facilities side regardless of which way the wind blows (suck vs blow, or input vs output or download vs upload, which are all exactly the same only reversed depending on which side you’re viewing.)
It used to be that circuits were provisioned symmetrically. That was the case from 75 baud modes through 9600 baud modems to 14400bps modems and even 56Kbps ones. Then add in 56K and 64Kbps frame-relay and ISDN B channels and heck why not 2x64Kbps to 128Kbps. ALL symmetrical. Want to pay a little more, get a “high capacity” (HICAP) circuit, aka a T-1 (E-1 in Europe) and enjoy 1.544Mbps (but 1.536 with ESF/B8ZS) or 2.048Mnps for Eu. ALL symmetrical.
T-1s not fast enough for ya? Ok, you can get a T-2 and have 6Mbps… or a T-3 (45Mbps) or an OC-1 (50M) or an OC-3 (155M) or an OC-12 (600M). Fortunately technology evolved to remove TDM services and allow Ethernet/FastE,GigE/10G/40G instead. ALL symmetrical.
CableCos and TelCos have no technological limitations preventing them from offering symmetric bandwidth. OB DISC 2: I’m also an amateur radio operator with a technician+ license. The radio waves have freely available unlicensed bandwidth, and the licensed links are cheap and easy to acquire in the US. (I have two at my house). The bandwidth provisioned on these are ALL symmetrical.
It is true that if you channelize DOCSIS frequencies and decide to allocat them assymetrically, there will be more in one direction than another, but that is simply moving the traditional “oversell model” from being something you can buy your way out of to MAKING IT THE CUSTOMER’S PROBLEM.
Imagine in Analogy World a brand new theater capable of showing super-Imax movies in 8K all day long, and it costs only a dollar to get in. The line to enter is immediate with no wait, and free popcorn and a drink are included. HOWEVER to exit you have to stand in line for ten minutes, there’s an exit fee, and you can’t take the food or drink with you, and sometimes your car isn’t there and you have to pay extra to get it back. THAT is what the CableCos and the Wireless broadband providers have created with their FAKE assymetry “requirements.”
Analogy World #2 has a six-lane highway but during rush hour it’s only open in one direction. People wanting to only go that one way are really happy. Those wanting to go in the reverse direction are really unhappy. But hey, six lanes. Most roads have a similar number of lanes in opposite directions. Most Information Superhighways do too.
What can you do? You can not buy service from companies that don’t want to serve you at the level you deserve. You can see what Dane Cook and Sonic have done, and work to do the same. You can read many of the stories on TD about how community broadband (or municipal broadband) lacks these arbitrary restrictions, and work to get those in YOUR community or municipality.
What should you not do? Accept as a given that bandwidth should be metered differently based on whether you’re sucking or blowing. For every megabyte you get, SOMEONE is sending a megabyte. For every megabyte YOU send, someone is receiving it. Both of you are paying for transiting that same data, and at least one of you is being throttled.
Re: Interesting
The funny part is that the backbone was Bought up by the major players. Instead of a Few minor corps to watch over it and keep it upgraded, Now its controlled by the Major corps.
Then we come to a Problem. Tech upgrades. Things have adapted more then a few times, in the last 20+ years for the backbone. But have they kept up?
If they are Like the phone and cable corps, They have not. And they wont fix anything until its broken. No matter HOW much money the Gov. gives them.
Most of this ISNT who OWNS the backbone, only Access to the backbone. So Who is supposed to upgrade it, and make it work better?
My isp may have proposed the new definition
My ISP is actually reducing upload speeds..the only ISP I know that is doing this.
I love the outrage posts
Bode may not be good at grammar*, but he’s got the profanities down. Trouble is, the standard for outrage is much higher than it was back in the days of DSL Reports. Today we get video outrage all over ex-Twitter and Rumble, so mere words just don’t stoke the passions as they used to. I think the Mr. McBodeface needs to try harder and do better. The definition of broadband is simply cosmetic.
*First sentence contradicts itself: “For decades, the FCC has maintained an arguably pathetic definition of “broadband,” allowing the telecom industry to under-deliver substandard access.” Doesn’t a pathetic definition make it harder to under-deliver?
Re:
I don’t get it either. This whole “anything below symmetric 1 GB is useless” claim is ridiculous.
I have 12/1 at my primary residence and 35/5 at my vacation residence. Both are “business class” service subsidized by my employer (meaning customer support has been excellent for the last 15 years) from a major cable company. At both locations (in California), I can do everything I need, including VOIP phone calls, zoom meetings, streaming videos, downloading linux distribution media, and uploading photos and videos, with no problems whatsoever. Admittedly, I’m single and live by myself, but I’d need to have a family of more than 1000000 to need GB service
I agree that the incumbent ISPs are greedy bastards that just want to provide minimal service for the maximum profit. That’s what you get with monopolies, especially when they own the politicians. I wouldn’t mind higher speeds, but I’m not interested in spending $100s per month for it.
My main point is that folks that say the existing standards are insufficient or that gigabit service is the minimum to full people’s need for internet access are just full of it.
Re: Re: point taken
But,
Its funny they keep wanting to increase Cellphone internet speeds, But NOT home based.
That a Good 50% Plus internet access is probably to read Email and wonder the internet, use the Chat service ONLY. Mostly for those older and those that Dont play games. Many could deal with a $200 computer, and never have a worry.
But NO ONE is offering a 245k, connection. For any reasonable price.
AND
To many things are Using the internet FOR NO REASON. Smart TV? Can you guess the problem when the hardware changes? Upgrades to Roku, Google, Apple TV?? Samsung has there and there are others.
They dont even offer Video chat with that 55″ TV.
Then we have alarm systems that WONT work unless connected to the net. Many programs wont work either. I have android App’s that Should be Single player, BUT they want to be connected to the net. I have one for my Watch, That wants Access to EVERYTHING on my phone, and if it doesnt get it..WONT WORK.
We do need to FIX this trend. Or make things Modular and Fixable.
Re: Re: Re:
Nothing funny about that. People expect home services to be “real” services, not some shit where they’re billed by the gigabyte (ISPs do attempt that where monopolies allow, but people hate it and the ISPs often back off). By contrast, people somehow think it’s normal for a cellular service to charge them extra if they use their full speed for more than a few minutes per month.
Re: Re: Re:2 Then they
REQUIRE the internet to USE products.
TV, TOASTERS, FRIG, WATCHES, Cellphone Apps that demand access to everything including the net So they can All ADVERT to you. Your Car Alarm, your home Alarm and camera systems..
And each piece costs MORE money. UNLESS you didnt need the net, JUST to see the time.(yep I went and got a timex watch)
What's the point?
They never even enforced 25/3. My DSL is still 3mb down in 2023. It’s insane.
Re: and
you pay a good price for it.
And now the cable companies have raised prices 20-30, because NOW they advert that the Gov. will pay for low income and disabled.
Which MEANS NOTHING to those paying the HIGHER PRICE from $50 to 70/80.