Former FCC President Ajit Pai left the building, but not without giving the telecommunications industry one last pat on the back: in his final Annual Broadband Report, he decided that upload speeds of 3 Mbps and download speeds of 25 Mbps are still more than good enough for American (via Ars Technica)
“We found that the current reference speed of 25/3 Mbps remains an appropriate measure for assessing whether a fixed service is providing advanced telecommunications capacity,” says the report.
Because? Because the FCC considers this to be all that is required by law: “We concluded that fixed services with speeds of 25/3 Mbps continue to meet the legal definition of advanced telecommunications capacity; that is, such services allow[] users originate and receive high quality voice, data, graphics and video telecommunications. ‘”
I don’t know what you consider “high quality”, but I know from experience that my 5 Mbps upload speed, for which I pay $ 100 a month, does not allow my family to “originate” too much in the form of video uploads big or game streaming.
By the way, these 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps speeds are not even minimal, because the Annual Broadband Report is not something to be applied. It is a benchmark by which the FCC determines whether it is doing its job to help eliminate the digital divide – where about 1 in 3 U.S. households does not have access to broadband internet.. Currently, if a single ISP claims that it can provide a single Internet connection 25 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up anywhere in your entire census blocklet alone your home, the FCC considers your work done. Oh, and the FCC doesn’t even audit those numbers! It is a kind of “fox guarding the henhouse”.
Some of the gaps in the reports are being corrected, but the ridiculous speeds and prices the United States pays are not.
As for Pai, who tops our list of the 84 biggest tech losers of the decade, he is now free to find a lucrative job as a lobbyist in the telecommunications industry. Former President Donald Trump gave his entire government explicit permission to do so, killing a five-year ban on employees lobbying their former agencies on their way out the door.