There has been a lot of discussion in the last few months about how wonderful it was for Congress to have increased the speed requirements for broadband grant eligibility to 100/20 Mbps in the $42.5 billion BEAD grants. But is it really all that wonderful?

It’s obvious that the FCC’s definition of broadband of 25/3 Mbps is badly out of date. That definition was set in 2015, and it seemed like an adequate definition at the time. If we accept that 25 Mbps was a good definition for download speed in 2015 and that 100 Mbps is a good definition in 2022, then that is an acknowledgment that the demand for download broadband speed has grown at about 21% per year, which is shown in the table below.

Historic Download Speed Demand in Megabits / Second

We have outside evidence that the 21% growth rate makes sense. Several times over the last decade, both Cisco and Opensignal opined that the residential demand for download speed has been growing at that same 21% rate. Cisco said that it thought business demand was growing at about a 23% clip.

This raises an interesting question of how good it is for a grant program today to use a 100 Mbps definition for broadband? The main reason that this is a relevant question is that the BEAD grants aren’t going to be constructed for many years. My best guess is that the majority of BEAD grants will be awarded in 2024, and ISPs will have four more years to finish network construction – until 2028. The above table shows how much broadband demand for download speed grew from 2015 until 2022. What might this look like by the time the BEAD networks are fully implemented?

Future Projected Download Speed Demand in Megabits / Second

If we accept that 100 Mbps download is adequate today as a definition of download broadband speed, then if broadband demand continues to grow at 21% annually, the definition of download broadband ought to be over 300 Mbps in 2028. I know many cynics will say that broadband demand cannot continue to grow at the historic rate, but those same people would have said the same thing in 2015 – and been proven wrong. In fact, there has been a steady growth curve for broadband speed demand back into the 1980s. There is no evidence I’ve heard that would indicate that the demand growth has slowed down.

We don’t really need to have this theoretical discussion of adequate broadband speeds because the market is ahead of the above speed growth curves. Since the early 2000s, cable companies have unilaterally raised the speed of basic broadband to keep ahead of the demand curve. The cable companies have raised minimum speeds every few years as an inexpensive way to keep customers happy with cable broadband.

The cable industry is in the process right now of increasing the speed of basic download speed to 200 Mbps – a number higher than predicted by the table above for 2022. There is a strong argument to be made that the cable companies have been resetting the definition of broadband while regulators were too timid to do so. I can remember when the cable companies collectively and unilaterally increased speeds to 6 Mbps. 12 Mbps, 30 Mbps, 60 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and now 200 Mbps.

This argument is further strengthened when considering that the big cable companies serve almost 70% of all broadband customers in the country today. When Congress gave the FCC responsibility for broadband in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the requirement that the FCC has largely shoved under the rug was that rural broadband should be in parity with urban broadband. If 70% of new broadband subscribers in the U.S. are offered 200 Mbps broadband as the slowest basic product, it’s hard to argue that having a definition of anything under 200 Mbps today is not parity.

Congress wasn’t all that brave in setting the definition of grant-eligible at 100/20 Mbps. That is the lowest possible current definition of download speeds, and a number that is already starting to drift to be obsolete. Recall the gnashing of teeth in the industry last year while the legislation was being created – cable companies and WISPs both thought that 100/20 Mbps was too aggressive.

If we really wanted to future-proof the BEAD grants, then technology that won’t be built until 2028 should be required to deliver at least 300 Mbps download. Anything less than that means networks that the public will feel are inadequate as they are being deployed.