The Federal Communications Commission is upping its benchmark for high-speed fixed broadband to download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second, the first major change the standard has seen since 2015.
The commission last week voted to adopt the benchmark, which is meant to be an indicator of whether all Americans have “sufficient access” to broadband. The commissioners included the updated standard in an annual report that concluded fixed broadband services have not been “physically deployed” to some 24 million Americans, including around 28% of those living in rural areas and more than 23% living on Tribal lands.
The 100/20 benchmark represents a substantial increase from the commission’s current 25/3 standard, which was adopted in 2015. To justify the increase, the document points to some federal and state broadband programs — including the massive $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program (BEAD) — that already require 100/20 Mbps speeds, as well as a report from the FCC’s Precision Agriculture Connectivity Task Force arguing 25/3 Mbps “is insufficient to enable innovation and utilization of precision agriculture and for transferring large amounts of data from field or farm to the cloud for storage.”
The report also sets a long-term goal of 1 Gbps/500 Mbps for broadband speeds. The reason for this, it states, is “to avoid sending an inappropriate signal to other policymakers as it appears, for instance, that some states may still be using 25/3 Mbps as their standard for some programs.”
“This long-term speed goal is aspirational — we do not intend to use it as the measure to determine our finding under section 706,” the report says of the 1 Gbps/500 Mbps goal. “Rather, we intend for it to serve as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment.”
Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 requires the FCC to conduct an inquiry annually to determine “whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”
The report containing the updated standard was approved by Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and commissioners Geoffrey Starks and Anna Gomez, all Democrats. The commission’s two Republican members, Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington, dissented.
FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel“This fix is overdue,” Rosenworcel wrote in a statement. “It aligns us with pandemic legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the work of our colleagues at other agencies. It also helps us better identify the extent to which low-income neighborhoods and rural communities are underserved.”
“I almost think of it like a strategic plan,” Mike Romano, the executive vice president of NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association, told Agri-Pulse. While the benchmark doesn’t directly change requirements for any current programs, it helps federal agencies and Congress set future goals, he added.
Carr, one of the commission members who dissented, criticized the 100/20 Mbps standard for ignoring satellite service, which he said is available to 99% of eligible locations. He added that he is concerned the commission’s long-term 1 Gbps/500 Mbps goal may be “a Trojan Horse to exclude fixed wireless in a future report because it is deemed not ‘capable’ of supporting aspirational speeds.”
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Simington similarly criticized the long-term 1 Gbps/500 Mbps goal.
“Before we adopt a 1000/500 Mbps long-term goal and begin to design our universal service programs around reaching it, we need to be able to articulate the use cases for such high speeds that justify making the taxpayer subsidize deployment of such service to every corner of the country,” Simington wrote in his dissent. “This report does no such thing, and I fear that it instead sets the stage for a generation of wasteful spending.”
Romano said NTCA originally wanted to see the agency adopt a standard higher than 100/20 Mbps but called the update “helpful.”
“I think the commission actually threaded the needle well here,” he said.
Similarly, Jim Matheson, the CEO of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, called the measure “a step in the right direction” in a press release, but said he’d like to see benchmark speeds of at least 100/100 Mbps implemented.
The commission, in its report, said it decided against adopting a symmetrical 100/100 Mbps benchmark in large part to stay consistent with the 100/20 Mbps. BEAD program requirements. The Agriculture Department’s ReConnect Program and some Treasury Department broadband programs currently follow a 100/100 Mbps standard, though the report said the sizes of these programs “pale in comparison to the BEAD program.”
“Despite our decision to not adopt a symmetrical upload benchmark at this time, we fully support deployment of broadband at faster upload speeds, as evidenced by our high cost [Universal Service Fund] programs, as well as the long-term goal that we discuss below,” the report says. “We intend to monitor upload speeds in future inquiries for purposes of considering additional updates to the fixed speed benchmark.”
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