Earlier this year Chairman Tom Wheeler of the FCC proposed to change the Lifeline program to support broadband in addition to voice. In that proposal he suggested that a household should get at least 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload in order to qualify for a Lifeline subsidy.

Here is where it gets weird. Frontier has filed comments that the 10/1 Mbps threshold is too high and that using such a high standard will stop a lot of rural households from getting Lifeline assistance. They are right, of course, but their solution is to lower the Lifeline threshold to whatever level is necessary to meet actual speeds in a given rural market.

Meanwhile, Frontier has taken a huge amount of money recently from the Connect America Fund for the purpose of raising rural DSL up to the 10/1 Mbps level. But they have six years to get to those speeds, and most of us in the industry think that even after all of their upgrades a lot of the rural households in the upgraded areas still won’t get 10/1 speeds. It’s going to be very hard for Frontier to do that with DSL in a rural setting where people are on scattered farms or back long lanes. I find it unlikely that Frontier, or any of the big telcos, are going to put enough fiber in the rural areas to actually achieve that goal.

But far more importantly, 10/1 DSL is not broadband. It’s not broadband by today’s current FCC definition that says broadband must be at least 25/3 Mbps, and it’s not broadband for real life applications.

I use my own household as the first example. There are two adults and one teenager. We work at home and we are cord cutters and get all of our video online. We have a 50 Mbps cable modem, and as cable modems tend to do, sometimes it slows down. When our speed hits 25 Mbps we’re all asking what is wrong with the Internet. So our household needs something greater than 25 Mbps for normal functioning. If we get less than that we have to cut back on something.

I have a friend with two teenage boys who are both gamers. He has a 100 Mbps Verizon FiOS connection on fiber, and when there are multiple games running everything else in the house comes to a screeching halt. For his household even 100 Mbps is not enough speed to meet his normal expected usage.

And yet here we are having discussion at the federal level of setting up two major programs that are using 10/1 Mbps as the standard goal of Internet speed. As a nation we are pouring billions of dollars into a project to improve rural DSL up to a speed that is already inadequate and by the time it is finally finished in six years will be massively below standard. It won’t take very many years for the average household to need 100 Mbps and we are instead taking six years to bring a huge amount of the rural parts of American up to 10/1 DSL.

I know that the FCC is trying to help. But it’s sad to see them crowing about having ‘fixed’ the rural broadband problem when instead they are condemning millions of households to have nearly worthless broadband for the next couple of decades. Imagine if they had instead allowed those billions of dollars to become matching funds for communities willing to invest in real broadband? Communities wanting to do this are out there and many of them were hoping to get some federal help to bring broadband to their areas. Building rural fiber is expensive, and even a little federal help would be enough to allow many rural areas to find the rest of the funding needed to build their own solutions.

And the problems are going to get worse, not better. Verizon didn’t even bother to take the federal subsidies to improve DSL because they don’t want to invest anything in rural copper. AT&T has told the FCC repeatedly that they want to tear down copper to millions of households and put rural households on cellular data. And while Frontier is going to try to make their rural copper plant better, how much can they realistically accomplish with 50–70 year-old copper that was neglected for decades before they bought it?

I just shake my head when I see that Frontier and the FCC are going to be wrangling about households getting Lifeline subsidies for speeds slower than 10/1 Mbps. The FCC has already decided that they are going to throw billions at rural copper and call it job done. It’s about time that we instead start having a conversation about bringing real broadband to rural America.