Four U.S. senators on Thursday asked the Biden government on Thursday to establish a “21st-century definition of high-speed broadband” of 100 Mbps both upstream and downstream. That would be a major upgrade over the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband standard of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream, which was established in 2015 and was never updated by former President Trump’s FCC chairman Ajit Pai.
Today’s letter was sent to FCC Acting President Jessica Rosenworcel and other federal officials by two Democrats, one Independent who agrees with Democrats and one Republican. They noted that ‘the pandemic has intensified the importance of high-speed broadband and highlighted the cost of the persistent digital divide in our country’, they write:
In the future, we must do everything in our power to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks that can deliver adequate download speeds and quality, including low latency, high reliability, and low network jitter, for modern and emerging applications such as two-way video conferencing. , telehealth, distance education, health IoT and smart grid applications. Our goal for new deployment should be symmetric speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), allowing for limited variation when determined by geography, topography or unreasonable cost.
“We must also insist that new networks backed by federal funds meet this higher standard, with limited exceptions in really hard-to-reach places,” the senators wrote later in the letter. “We have seen for years that billions of taxpayers deploy networks that are outdated once completed, that are incapable and do not replace the lack of broadband infrastructure.”
The letter was written by sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Angus King (I-Maine), Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Joe Manchin (DW.Va.). In addition to Rosenworcel, it was sent to Trade Secretary Gina Raimondo, Agriculture Minister Tom Vilsack and National Economic Council Director Brian Deese.
‘Ask a parent who contacts their doctor via telemedicine, a farmer hoping to unlock the benefits of precision agriculture, a student receiving live-stream education, or any family where both parents work telepathically and teach multiple children at a distance, and they will tell you that many networks in the year 2021 will not come close to ‘high speed’, ‘they wrote. “For any of these features, upload speeds much higher than 3 Mbps are of utmost importance. These challenges will not end with the pandemic.”
Rosenworcel called for higher speeds
Rosenworcel already supports a standard above the current FCC. “With so many of our country’s providers deploying gigabit service, it’s time for the FCC to adjust its baseline upwards as well,” she said in April 2020, calling for a 100 Mbps download standard and a upload standard of higher than 3 Mbps. ‘At the moment we are standard [for uploads] is 3 megabits per second, “she said at the time. But this asymmetric approach is dated. We need to realize that with extraordinary changes in data processing and cloud storage, the upload speed needs to be reconsidered. ‘
The FCC standard is important for the commission’s annual broadband deployment report, which determines how many Americans are ‘unattended’ and assesses the country’s progress toward universal accessibility. The adoption of a higher speed standard will make it more likely that the FCC will see that broadband deployment is not happening fast enough and act more aggressively to accelerate the deployment.
The FCC is not as active as it could be now because there is a divide between Democrats and Republicans. President Joe Biden can rectify this by appointing a new Democratic commissioner, but he has not yet done so.
100 Mbps a big upgrade for upload
Going from 25 / 3Mbps to 100 / 100Mbps is a particularly big upgrade on the upload side. Today’s cable companies’ offer would not be able to reach the 100 Mbps upload threshold, because even Gigabit download cables from Comcast and Charter have only 35 Mbps upload speeds. The cable industry has been promising faster upload speeds driven by upgrades to DOCSIS, the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, for years. However, the cable speeds are still unbalanced, which offers much higher download speeds than upload speeds.
In contrast, AT & T and Verizon’s fastest fiber plans have a download speed of 940 Mbps and a upload speed of 880 Mbps. Even the cheaper, lower-tier plans offered by fiber-to-the-home ISPs meet the senators’ proposed 100/100 Mbps standard.
Cable is widespread in the US as fiber. The eight largest cable companies combined have 72.8 million Internet subscribers, according to Leichtman Research Group. The top eight cordless phone companies have 33 million Internet subscribers, but that includes both fiber-to-the-home and DSL, and the copper-line DSL networks are very outdated and poorly maintained.
A serious commitment to symmetrical broadband of 100 Mbps can require a lot of fiber construction in the US. The senators’ letter did not take a fiber-or-bust position, but they want federal funding in rural areas to support higher upload speeds than you normally get with cable:
While we realize that in truly hard-to-reach areas, we need to be flexible in reaching out to non-serving 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 kind of speeds that households in typical well-served urban and suburban areas use (for example, according to speedtest.net’s January 2021 analysis, the average service is currently 180 Mbps download / 65 Mbps upload with 24 millisecond latency.
The senators are also frustrated by different standards in agencies. “We now have several definitions in federal agencies for what is an area served by broadband, resulting in patchwork without one fixed standard for broadband,” 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 / 3Mbps). Alternatively, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines it as just 10 / 1Mbps.”
FCC implementation data
The FCC supports all networks faster than the standard 25/3 Mbps. The commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) has so far allocated $ 9.2 billion over ten years to 180 entities to deploy broadband to 5.2 million unoccupied homes and businesses. The FCC said that ’99, 7 percent of these locations will receive broadband at a speed of at least 100/20 Mbps, with an overwhelming majority (more than 85 percent) of gigabit speed broadband. ‘ The funding goes to a mix of cable, fiber and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.
According to the most recent report on the implementation of the FCC broadband, by the end of 2019, 95.6 percent of Americans will have access to fixed broadband with speeds of at least 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream. The implementation at higher speeds is more limited, especially in rural and tribal areas. The report said, for example, that speeds of 250 / 25Mbps are available to 87.2 percent of the people nationwide, 55.6 percent of the people in rural areas and 49.6 percent of the tribal residents.
These data points probably do not signify the number of Americans who are not served, because the FCC ISPs can make an entire census block count as it is served, even if it can serve only one house in the block. The commission plans to collect geospatial maps from ISPs to make the data more accurate.