I wrote a recent blog that talked about how the FCC is recommending to stick with the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband for another year. In that blog, I mostly talked about how 25 Mbps download is out of touch when the FCC claims that 85% of homes today can buy 250/25 Mbps broadband.

Today I want to look at the second half of the definition – the upload speed. The FCC is proposing, in 2020 – the year when millions were sent home for work and school – that 3 Mbps upload is a sufficiently high definition of broadband. Sticking with the 3 Mbps definition of broadband makes no sense. I contend that 3 Mbps is massively out of touch with the needs of the average home. To make matters worse, the FCC will allow an ISP that offers 25/3 broadband to bid in and win grant funding in October’s RDOF grant – a network which the ISP then has six years to build. The FCC doesn’t just think that 25/3 is adequate broadband today, they think that is okay broadband size years from now.

The pandemic has made it clear to a lot of households that upload speeds matter. Before the pandemic, customers that cared about the upload speeds tended to be folks that sent huge files such as doctors, architects, engineers, photographers, etc. When they worked from home these folks have known for years that the upload speeds on the average home network are inadequate.

All of a sudden this year, millions of homes found out that they don’t have enough upload broadband speeds. Consider the amount of bandwidth that is needed to work from home. There are two uses of upload broadband that are new to most people – connecting to a school or work server and participating in Zoom or other online meetings.

Many home and work servers require the creation of a virtual private network (VPN). A VPN is a dedicated connection – the home connects and stays connected to a school or work server. It generally requires dedicating at least 1 Mbps of bandwidth, but usually more, to create and maintain a VPN connection. This means that somebody working at home on a VPN is going to tie up 1 – 3 Mbps of bandwidth that can’t be used for anybody else in the home.

Zoom calls also require upload bandwidth. The Zoom website says that a home should have a 2 Mbps connection, both upload and download to sustain a Zoom session between just two people. The amount of download bandwidth increases with each person connected to the call, meaning Zoom recommends the 2 Mbps upload, but a 6 Mbps download for a meeting with three other people.

There are other uses for upload bandwidth in the home as well. For example, a telemedicine call can use even slightly more bandwidth than connecting to work or school servers. Upload bandwidth is needed for gaming in the cloud. Upload bandwidth is also used to back-up data files, pictures, etc. into the cloud.

It doesn’t take complicated math to see why a 3 Mbps connection is inadequate for any household that wants to make more than one upload-heavy connection to the Internet at the same time. 3 Mbps is not enough bandwidth for multiple people in a home trying to connect to work and school servers or to make Zoom-like calls. I’ve heard from numerous people this year telling me they can’t have more than one person at a time using their home broadband connection. Many of these complaints came from households using broadband provided by the big cable companies, and many of these homes thought they had plenty of bandwidth until the pandemic hit.

For the FCC to stick with 3 Mbps upload as the definition of broadband is a slap in the face to every family where more than one person wants to connect to the web at the same time. With that definition, the FCC is blessing any ISP that delivers 3 Mbps upload speeds.

Even if the FCC doesn’t want to upgrade the download component of the definition of broadband, they can’t turn a blind idea to the millions of homes trying to make it through the pandemic. If social scientists are right, there will likely be millions of people who continue to work remotely even after the end of the pandemic. This is not a temporary problem that is somehow going to go away.

It’s hard to think that the minimum acceptable definition of upload speeds should be anything slower than 25 Mbps. Assuming a robust WiFi network, that’s enough bandwidth for 3 – 4 adults and/or students to work from home at the time. So FCC, please reconsider the definition of upload speeds. If you stick with 3 Mbps upload as the definition of broadband it means you don’t support broadband networks that can deliver the speeds that the average households need.