FCC President Jessica Rosenwessel suggestion Increase the minimum permissible transfer rate for services classified as “broadband” to 100 Mbps for downloads and 20 Mbps for uploads. The minimum acceptable 100/20 service level is a significant upgrade to the FCC’s 2015 minimum standard for broadband set at 25 / 3Mbps.
According to Rosenworcel, you may agree, the FCC’s 25/3 metric is outdated. This was fully revealed during the heyday of the pandemic by all the internet games, media consumption, and WFH tasks that became central to many people’s daily lives. In addition, the FCC chair commented that current broadband standards are harmful in some respects.
“The 25/3 indicator is not only outdated, but also harmful because it masks the extent to which low-income neighborhoods and rural communities are left behind and offline,” Rosenwarsel explained. increase.
How did telecommunications bureaucrats come to determine a minimum standard of 100 / 20Mbps? The FCC states that it believes in setting “big goals” so that everyone in the online world of the 21st century can take fair shots. It is said that there is a “scope of evidence” to support the new minimum proposed broadband speeds, including some work previously done as part of infrastructure investment and employment legislation.
The FCC proposal is a small but important step. Second, the proposal needs to be voted on by a committee that is currently divided by two Democrats and two Republicans, and needs to fill the vacancy. When the proposal reaches the next stage of implementation, the telecommunications company must be encouraged by government funding and forced into a threat of regulatory action. The Commission is keen to ensure that telecommunications companies offer “affordable, recruitment, availability, and fair access” and provide services that are reasonably timely deployed.
I checked speedtest.net Today, the median fixed broadband speed across the United States was 154 Mbps downloads, which was 21.6 Mbps downloads using June 2022 data. This data broadly shows that the new 100/20 broadband goals should not be an insurmountable challenge for the government and private sector to achieve. Most of the upgrade work probably needs to be done in the low-income rural communities mentioned above. The United States ranks eighth in the world in (median) broadband speeds.
The newly proposed 100 / 20Mbps standard may take some time to overcome some hurdles, but it should eventually turn into a green light. With the efforts needed to keep the definition of broadband up-to-date as evidence, the FCC has also begun to carefully promote another national goal of 1 Gbps / 500 Mbps, which heralds the arrival of the “Gigabit Future.”
