After years of deadlocked votes, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is fully staffed and making progress. For the first time since 2015, the FCC has voted to increase the standards for what constitutes "broadband" internet connectivity. Going forward, only connections with at least 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up will be considered broadband.
FCC chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel has been calling for this action for several years, ever since taking over the position from Ajit Pai in 2021. However, the commission has been deadlocked, with two Democrats voting to increase the standard and two Republican members voting against it. Republicans in Congress blocked President Biden's first FCC nominee for the empty seat, lawyer and activist Gigi Sohn. However, the body approved Anna Gomez last fall after Sohn withdrew from consideration. That gave the Democratic wing of the FCC a 3-2 advantage to pass the measure. It's quite a turnaround from a few years ago when the Republican-run FCC wanted to lower the standard.
Before this change, the FCC considered a connection with 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up to be broadband. That speed routed to a single device might be workable in 2024, but supplying an entire home with bandwidth from such a connection is going to be miserable. The FCC says its decision to raise the cutoff is based on the standards used by multiple federal and state programs, as well as the way people use the internet and the services they access.
This is not going to make Comcast or AT&T bump speeds overnight, but that might be the eventual effect. The FCC's mandate includes a provision to evaluate whether Americans have reasonable access to "advanced telecommunications." The draft report explains that the latest analysis shows 25/3Mbps does not meet that standard.
Based on data from the end of 2022, the FCC says that broadband internet is not being deployed quickly enough. About 24 million Americans do not have access to high-speed wired internet access, including 28% of those in rural areas. The report excludes satellite internet like Starlink from the calculation. The FCC has a complex relationship with satellite internet in general and Starlink in particular. After initially granting Starlink a $885.5 million subsidy in 2022 to expand access, it backtracked due to the high cost of Starlink's hardware. Each subscriber needs a $600 dish to connect to the Starlink network.
The new broadband standard will color many of the agency's regulatory decisions, which is probably why the Republican commissioners stand opposed. The current FCC leadership hopes this is just the start, though. The report sets a long-term goal of increasing the broadband threshold to 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up, and the commission hopes to nudge ISPs in that direction over the coming years.
