There is a lot of buzz floating around in the industry that the FCC might lower the official definition of broadband from 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. Two of the current FCC commissioners including the chairman opposed setting that definition a few years back. Lowering the speeds would let the FCC off the hook for the requirement by law to make sure that the whole country can get broadband. If they lower the definition, then voila, millions more Americans would be declared to have adequate broadband.

So today I thought I’d take a look at the download speeds we really need at our homes. You may recall that back when the FCC set the 25/3 Mbps definition that they made a list of the broadband speed needed to do typical activities. And in doing so they tried to create profiles of some typical American households. That attempt was awkward, but it was a good starting point for examining household bandwidth needs. I’m updating their list a bit for things that people do today, which is already different than just a few years ago. Consider the following web activities:

• Web Background 5 Mbps
• Web Browsing 1 – 2 Mbps
• Online Class 1 – 2 Mbps
• Social Media 1 – 2 Mbps
• Streaming Music 3 Mbps
• Voice over IP 2 Mbps
• SD Video stream 1 – 3 Mbps
• HD Video Stream 4 – 6 Mbps
• 4K Video Stream 15 – 20 Mbps
• Gaming 1 – 3 Mbps
• Skype / Video Conference 1 – 3 Mbps
• Big File Downloader 50 Mbps

People don’t agree with all of these listed speeds because there are no standards for how the web works. For example, by using different compression schemes a video stream from Netflix is not identical to one from Amazon. And even from one source there is variation since an action move takes more bandwidth than something like a stand-up comedy routine.

It’s important to remember that broadband demand can come from any device in your house – desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, etc. It’s also important to note that these are speed requirements for a single user. If two people in the house are watching an separate video, then you have to double the above number.

What the FCC failed to consider back when they set the speed definition is that households need enough bandwidth to handle the busiest times of the day. What matters is the number of simultaneous activities a home can do at the same time on the web, with most families being busiest in the evenings. There might be somebody on social media, somebody watching an HD movie, while somebody else is doing homework while also using a smartphone to swap pictures.

There is another issue to consider when trying to do simultaneous tasks on the Internet – packet loss. The connection between the ISP and a customer gets more congested when it’s trying to process multiple data streams at the same time. Engineers describe this as packet collision – which sounds like some kind of bumper-car ride – but it’s an apt way to describe the phenomenon. Most home routers are not sophisticated enough to simultaneously handle too many multiple streams at once. Packets get misdirected or lost and the router requests the missing packets to be sent again from the originator. The busier the router, the more packet interference. This is also sometimes called ‘overhead’ in the industry and this overhead can easily grow to 15% or more of the total traffic on a busy connection, meaning it takes 15% more bandwidth to complete a task than if that task was the only thing occurring on the broadband connection.

There is another kind of interference that happens in homes that have a WiFi network. This is a different kind of interference that has to do with the way that WiFi works. When a WiFi network gets multiple requests for service, meaning that many devices in the home are asking for packets, the WiFi router gets overwhelmed easily and shuts down. It then reinitiates and sends packets to the first device that gets its attention. In a busy network environment the WiFi router will shut down and restart constantly as it tries to satisfy the many needed devices. This kind of interference was designed into the WiFi specification as a way to ensure that WiFi could satisfy the needs of multiple devices. This WiFi overhead can also easily add 15% or more to the network demand.

Anybody who lives in a home with active users understands how networks can get overwhelmed. How many of you have been frustrated trying to watch a movie when others in the house are using the Internet? Even big bandwidth can be overwhelmed. I have a friend who has a 100 Mbps fiber connection on Verizon FiOS. He went to watch a video and it wouldn’t stream. He found that his two teenage sons were each using half a dozen gaming streams at the same time and had basically exhausted his fast bandwidth pipe.

The FCC can tinker with the official definition of broadband since that is their prerogative. But what they can’t do is to define for any given home how much bandwidth they really need. The funny thing is that the big ISPs all understand this issue. The cable companies have unilaterally increased speeds across-the-board to urban customers several times in recent years and in most markets offer speeds considerably faster than the current FCC definition of broadband. These ISPs know that if they were only delivering 25 Mbps that they would be overwhelmed with customers complaining about the connection. Those complaints are the real proof of how much bandwidth many homes need. If the FCC lowers the definition of broadband then they have on blinders and are ignoring how homes really use broadband today. If they lower the speed definition it’s hard to see it as anything other than a political move.