Four US senators asked the Biden government on Thursday to establish a “21st century definition for high-speed broadband” of 100 Mbps both upstream and downstream. This would be a major upgrade from the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, which was established in 2015 and never updated by former President Trump’s FCC President Ajit Pai.
Today’s letter was sent to FCC President-in-Office, Jessica Rosenworcel, and other federal officials, by two Democrats, an independent who agrees with the Democrats and a Republican. Noting that “the pandemic has reinforced the importance of high-speed broadband and underscored the cost of persistent digital exclusion in our country”, they wrote:
In the future, we must make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload quality and speed, including low latency, high reliability and low network instability, for modern and emerging uses such as videoconferencing. bidirectional, telehealth, remote learning, health IoT and smart grid applications. Our goal for the new deployment should be symmetrical speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), allowing for limited variation when dictated by geography, topography or irrational cost.
“We must also insist that the new networks supported by federal funds meet this higher standard, with limited exceptions for locations that are really difficult to reach,” the senators later wrote in the letter. “For years, we have seen billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing network deployments that are out of date as soon as they are completed, out of capacity and unable to replace inadequate broadband infrastructure.”
The letter was written by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Col.), Angus King (I-Maine), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Joe Manchin (DW.Va.). In addition to Rosenworcel, he was sent to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and the director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese.
“Ask any senior citizen who connects with their doctor via telemedicine, any farmer who hopes to discover the benefits of precision farming, any student who receives instruction transmitted live, or any family where parents telework and several children learn remotely , and they will say that many networks did not come close to ‘high speed’ in the year 2021 “, they wrote. “For any of these functions, upload speeds well in excess of 3 Mbps are particularly critical. These challenges will not end with the pandemic.”
Rosenworcel pushed for higher speeds
Rosenworcel already supports a standard above the current FCC. “With so many providers in our country launching gigabit service, it is time for the FCC to adjust its baseline upwards too,” she said in April 2020, calling for a download pattern of 100 Mbps and an upload pattern of more than 3 Mbps . “At the moment, our standard [for uploads] is 3 megabits per second, “she said at the time.” But this asymmetric approach is dated. We need to recognize that, with extraordinary changes in data processing and cloud storage, upload speeds must be rethought. “
The FCC standard is important to the commission’s annual broadband rollout report, which determines how many Americans are “unfulfilled” and assesses the country’s progress toward universal availability. The adoption of a higher speed standard would make it more likely that the FCC will find that the deployment of broadband is not happening fast enough and take more aggressive steps to accelerate the deployment.
The FCC is not as active as it could be now because there is a 2 to 2 divide between Democrats and Republicans. President Joe Biden can fix this by appointing a new Democratic commissioner, but he has not yet done so.
100 Mbps, a major update for uploads
Going from 25 / 3Mbps to 100 / 100Mbps would be an especially big update on the upload side. Current cable companies’ offerings would not meet the 100 Mbps upload limit, as even Comcast and Charter’s gigabit cable download plans come with upload speeds of just 35 Mbps. The cable industry for years has promised faster upload speeds with updates to DOCSIS, the cable data service interface specification. But cable speeds are still unbalanced, providing download speeds much faster than upload speeds.
In contrast, the fastest fiber plans from AT&T and Verizon come with download speeds of 940 Mbps and upload speeds of 880 Mbps. Even the cheapest, lower-level plans offered by home fiber ISPs meet the 100/100 Mbps standard proposed by senators.
Cable is much more widespread than fiber in the USA. The eight largest cable companies combined have 72.8 million Internet subscribers, according to the Leichtman Research Group. The top eight fixed-line companies have 33 million Internet subscribers, but that includes home fiber and DSL, and these copper-line DSL networks are seriously outdated and under-maintained.
A serious commitment to symmetrical 100 Mbps broadband may require much more fiber construction in the United States. The senators’ letter did not take a fiber or flawed position, but they want federal funding in rural areas to support higher upload speeds than you normally get with cable:
While we recognize that in areas that are really hard to reach, we need to be flexible to reach unattended Americans, we must strive to ensure that all members of a typical family can use these applications simultaneously. There is no reason why federal funding for rural areas should not support the type of speeds used by households in typical well-served urban and suburban areas (for example, according to the January 2021 analysis by speedtest.net, the service average is currently 180 Mbps download / 65 Mbps upload with 24 millisecond latency.
Senators are also frustrated by different standards across agencies. “We now have several definitions at federal agencies for what constitutes an area served with broadband, resulting in a patchwork without a consistent broadband standard,” they wrote. “For example, the FCC defines high-speed broadband as download speeds of up to 25 megabits per second and upload speeds of up to 3 megabits per second (25/3 Mbps). Alternatively, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA ) defines it as only 10/1 Mbps. “
FCC deployment data
The FCC already supports networks faster than the standard 25/3 Mbps. The commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) has provisionally granted $ 9.2 billion over 10 years to 180 entities to deploy broadband in 5.2 million homes and businesses that are not serviced. The FCC said that “99.7 percent of these locations will receive broadband at speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps, with an overwhelming majority (more than 85 percent) receiving gigabit speed broadband.” The funding goes to a combination of cable, fiber and fixed wireless providers, in addition to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.
The FCC’s most recent broadband rollout report said that at the end of 2019, 95.6 percent of Americans had access to fixed broadband with speeds of at least 25 Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. Deployment at higher speeds is more limited, especially in rural and tribal areas. For example, the report said that 250 / 25Mbps speeds are available to 87.2% of people across the country, 55.6% of people in rural areas and 49.6% of tribal residents.
These data points are likely to underestimate the number of unattended Americans because the FCC allows ISPs to count an entire census block as served, even though it may serve only one house in the block. The commission plans to collect geospatial maps from ISPs to make the data more accurate.