FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has proposed changes to the way the FCC sets broadband goals and tracks broadband coverage. The proposed changes are included in the Nineteenth Section 706 Notice of Enquiry, which is scheduled to come for a vote at the FCC’s August meeting.
One of the areas being explored in the Notice is how the FCC determines the speed of broadband.
- The FCC asks if 100/20 Mbps should be the benchmark for defining fixed broadband. This is a question that almost every annual Enquiry has asked, and the FCC will be asking for input. For example, should the FCC consider the speeds consumers buy when given an option of multiple speed tiers (spoiler alert, ISPs report that a significant percentage of consumers buy speeds of 500 Mbps or faster when they have the option).
- The FCC is also asking the annual question of how to judge adequate cellular speeds. In recent years, the speed goal for 5G outdoor coverage has been 35/3 Mbps. The FCC is asking if that should remain the goal and if it should be extended to include speeds inside moving vehicles.
- The FCC is recommending keeping the current benchmark for school broadband of 1 Gbps per 1,000 students. They are asking for comments on this benchmark. I’ve talked to numerous school officials who all say the current metric is obsolete and that they need 3-5 simultaneous Mbps per student, which would mean 3 – 5 Gbps are needed for a school with 1,000 students.
- One proposal in the Enquiry that is going to be controversial is a recommendation to drop the future goal of eventually achieving 1000/500 Mbps broadband speeds. The FCC says that having a future goal is not necessary since it’s not required by statute. The FCC, under Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel, adopted the future goal as a way to show the FCC’s support for building fiber. This preference for fiber was heavily baked into the original rules adopted by Congress for BEAD, but that preference has recently been greatly watered down.
Scrapping the gigabit goal for future broadband and sticking with 100/20 Mbps as the definition of broadband is out of synch with the market. OpenVault reported last year that 32% of U.S. homes are subscribed to gigabit broadband from fiber ISPs or cable companies.
The Enquiry also asks about how the FCC should track broadband deployment – who has broadband. The FCC wants to know if it makes sense to note homes in the FCC maps that are covered by a grant program that promises to bring faster speeds in the future.
I’m in favor of counting broadband coverage in two ways. One is a pure tabulation of the FCC mapping data that shows the number of homes not covered by broadband as of the latest FCC reporting date. It also makes sense to report how many of those homes have a coming broadband commitment. But homes with a commitment should not be counted as served until the new broadband is built. There have been plenty of defaults in the RDOF program, and there is no reason to think that ISPs won’t default on grants awarded by the many other state and federal grant programs.
The FCC also asks about the challenge of counting homes served by satellite broadband. It seems likely that a lot of States are going to award BEAD funds to Starlink and Kuiper. Is there any sensible way for the FCC to show areas covered by satellite for BEAD as having broadband if the same designation isn’t extended to neighboring areas not covered by BEAD. Recognizing all the places claimed by satellite probably means that almost the whole country would be counted as served, in which case you might as well toss out the broadband map. I’m not sure how the FCC can open the door and count some locations as served by satellite but not others.
“””OpenVault reported last year that 32% of U.S. homes are subscribed to gigabit broadband from fiber ISPs or cable companies”””
I just have one question. Show me the other plans offered to these locations, along with the pricing. I’ll bet you that most are subscribed to that because it’s the easy thing to do.
I pulled up the OpenVault report from Q1 2025 and got some numbers out of it.
0.16% of users hit >5TB in a month
Only 61% of those stay in that 5TB group the next month – 33% drop to 2-5TB and 2.8% drop below 1TB.
Doing some math, if you figure that 100% of the downloaded monthly data amount is used inside 1 hour each day across the whole month the TB groups break down like this:
5TB — 397 Mbps
4TB — 159 Mbps
3TB — 79 Mbps
2TB — 39 Mbps
1TB — 15 Mbps
So if you are one of the small % of users that hit 5TB+ a month, and you only use the internet for 1 hour every day, you can do that on 400 Mbps. Now we all know you an internet service plan isn’t happy tapping 100% when in use, but I think we can agree stacking 100% of the usage up in 1 hour of each day is on the high side of reality. And that is on 0.16% of internet users. We have clients hitting those TB numbers easily on 25 Mbps service. And to be clear we are aiming for 100 Mbps minimum but we offer a 25 Mbps for $10 / month less than our 100 Mbps service and a lot of people take that still.
Help me make this make sense.
Most of the arguments against faster broadband seem to come from the same companies that can’t deliver it. They’re not protecting the public—they’re protecting their market share.
The idea that people only need 100/20 Mbps assumes we still live in a world where the internet is used for an hour a day. That’s not reality. In 2025, reliable broadband powers everything from remote work and telehealth to smart home systems and real-time collaboration. And many of these applications depend just as much on upload speed as download.
If the FCC really wants to support the future, it should be setting a minimum standard of 100/100 Mbps, regardless of whether it’s fiber, fixed wireless, or something else. A “technology-neutral” approach is only meaningful if the performance bar is high enough to reflect real-world needs—not set low enough that any legacy system can pass.
We deserve a broadband policy that plans ahead—not one that locks us into yesterday’s limitations.
“””We deserve a broadband policy that plans ahead—not one that locks us into yesterday’s limitations.”””
We’ve been doing that for 12 years now, with our own cash, using Fixed Wireless. It provides service that exceeds today’s demands, including all of the ones you mentioned, as well as planning ahead for future needs. So we can check that box complete.
“””Most of the arguments against faster broadband seem to come from the same companies that can’t deliver it”””
If that was directed at us, from the reply I posted, then I’d like to address it. We can deliver those speeds you mentioned. We absolutely have the technology to delivery 500Mbps or greater service speeds to all our Fixed Wireless clients. The question is why would we? They don’t use it. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don’t operate an ISP, because the comments you left here typically come from people without operational experience.
Why would I increase my business expense today to deliver something no client is asking for, and no client needs? We started with 10×3 Mbps. We now offer up to 300×100 Mbps. As real usage increased, we increased our offering to match. Never once in 12 years have I had one single client, not one, leave because we weren’t fast enough. Never happened. Please explain why that is. In all of those 12 years we have had competition that offered faster speeds than we do, and usually for a cheaper price. Our clients are not locked into a single ISP. They have choices. We only lose people when they move out of coverage area.
We will continue to increase speeds to meet real life usage and be successful. With our own money, no handouts. The numbers I posted, from the OpenVault report itself proves the point.
I’d like you to back up your position by describing the throughput use of each of these things. I’ll aggree that more symetrical connections is a positive move, but exactly what doesn’t 100×20 do well? 4K netflix wants a 32Mbps speed test and pulls an average of 12-18Mbps. zoom is 1.5-3Mbps. a voip call is 100Mbps services have charts that are void except for thin lines of use. SOME people use more, they need more, and we offer a plan for them. At some point people need to realize that cost is one of the primary factors and the only way to cheat the cost as an ISP is to reach to the government for tax money, to solve a problem that isn’t really a problem in most places.
The bad side to pushing for ever higher ‘minimum’ speeds its that drives cost up. Every one of those customers that has a 25×5 service for cheap and is happy with it would rather have the low price than the 1Gbps speeds, else they’d just upgrade. Delivering 25×5 reliably is a tiny fraction of the cost of delivering the 1Gbps service.
I think the explosion of inferior cellular internet for ultra cheap makes it very clear that the ‘slow’ cheap plans are valid and wanted by a lot of people.
“Recognizing all the places claimed by satellite probably means that almost the whole country would be counted as served, in which case you might as well toss out the broadband map.”
Huh? The FCC National Broadband Map would still be useful for understanding the reach of different companies and technologies. People and policymakers interested in other definitions of “served” could still use the data to make their own assessments and plans, even if the FCC declared victory.