Tag Archives: Definition of broadband

The Demand for Broadband Speed

This is the first in a series of blogs this week that will look at the long-term trajectory of the broadband industry.

The recent decision of the FCC to increase the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps got me thinking about the long term trajectory of the demand for broadband speed. For many years, Cisco issued reports that regularly reported that the demand for speed was growing at roughly 21% per year for residential broadband, and a little faster for business broadband. Cisco and others noted that the curve of broadband speeds was on a relatively straight line back to the early 1980s.

It’s not hard to test the Cisco long-term growth rate. The following table applies a 21% growth rate to the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband that was established by the FCC in 2015.

This table is somewhat arbitrary since it assumes that broadband demand in 2015 was exactly 25 Mbps – but there was widespread praise of this definition at that time, other than from ISPs who wanted to stick with the 4/1 Mbps definition. This simple table accurately predicts that we would be talking about the need to increase the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps download around 2022 – which is exactly what happened. The FCC had to deal with political issues and wasn’t able to make the change until March 2024 – but in 2022, the FCC wanted to change the definition of broadband to a speed that was at a 21% compounded annual growth rate from the definition the FCC had established in 2015.

I can’t think of any fundamental changes that would say that this same growth in demand won’t happen in the near future. Consider the following chart that starts with the assumption that 100 Mbps is the right definition of broadband in 2022. Growing that number over time by the same 21% results in the following table. This table predicts that by 2030 we should be having the conversation about increasing the definition of download broadband to 500 Mbps. This prediction seems very reasonable to me.

However, 2030 is only six years from now, and today’s topic is looking into the future. One way to think about future demand is to look back at the broadband speeds 25 years ago. In 1999, both telcos and cable companies offered 1 Mbps DSL broadband connection as an upgrade to dial-up – and 1 Mbps became the de facto definition of broadband at the time. Twenty five years later, the definition of broadband was increased to 100 Mbps, a 100-fold increase. This tracks directly with Cisco’s reported growth rate, and the growth rate of download speed between 1999 and 2022 works out to be 21.2% per year.

There are a lot of reasons to think that the demand for faster speeds will keep growing. Every year we find more uses for fast broadband. If we plot the demand for broadband speeds out for 25 more years, at the historical rate of growth, demand would be 100 times higher in 25 years than it is today. That would mean the right definition of broadband in 25 years would be 10 gigabits.

I know that a lot of people will jump all over this prediction and say it’s ludicrous and unrealistic. But consider the last 25 years. You would have been hard pressed to find anybody in 1999 who would have predicted that the definition of download speed in 2022 would be 100 Mbps. This is partially because the human mind has a hard time accepting the results of compounded growth – the results after many years of growth always feels too large. I was already running my consulting company in 1999, and I don’t recall anybody who was visionary enough to predict a hundred-fold increase in broadband speeds over twenty-five years. Anybody saying that would have been laughed out of most industry forums – it would have sounded like a fantasy. Yet here we are – the demand for download speed really increased 100-fold since 1999.

There is one weakness in my argument – it’s very hard to pin down a concrete number for the demand for broadband speed. In the context I’ve been using (and the way the FCC looks at speed), broadband speed demand is a composite number encompassing the average of all broadband users. There is a wide range of opinions on the right definition of broadband speed. ISPs operating older and slower technologies still swear that 25 Mbps is all the speed anybody needs. Fiber ISPs think the definition should be gigabit since one-third of households are now subscribing to gigabit speeds. The fact that the FCC set the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps is an interesting data point – but the FCC definition of speed doesn’t mean much more than that it’s a conservative compromise of the many opinions from around the industry.

There are more concrete data points to consider, and the next blog in the series will look at the demand for broadband usage.

FCC Considers New Definition of Broadband

On November 1, the FCC released a Notice of Inquiry that asks about various topics related to broadband deployment. One of the first questions asked is if the definition of broadband should be increased to 100/20 Mbps. I’ve written about this topic so many times over the years that writing this blog almost feels like déjà vu. Suffice it to say that the current FCC with a newly installed fifth Commissioner finally wants to increase the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps.

The NOI asks if that definition is sufficient for the way people use broadband today. Of most interest to me is the discussion of the proposed 20 Mbps definition of upload speed. Anybody who follows the industry knows that the use of 20 Mbps to define upload speeds is a political compromise that is not based upon anything other than extreme lobbying by the cable industry to not set the number higher. The NOI cites studies that say that 20 Mbps is not sufficient for households with multiple broadband users, yet the FCC still proposes to set the definition at 20 Mbps.

There are some other interesting questions being asked by the NOI. The FCC asks if it should rely on its new BDC broadband maps to assess the state of broadband – as if they have an option. The answer to anybody who digs deep into the mapping data is a resounding no, since there are still huge numbers of locations where speeds claimed in the FCC mapping are a lot higher than what is being delivered. The decision by the FCC to allow ISPs to report marketing speeds doomed the maps to be an ISP marketing tool rather than any accurate way to measure broadband deployment. It’s not hard to predict a time in a few years when huge numbers of people start complaining about being missed by the BEAD grants because of the inaccurate maps. But the FCC has little choice but to stick with the maps it has heavily invested it.

The NOI asks if the FCC should set a longer-term goal for future broadband speeds, like 1 Gbps/500 Mbps. This ignores the more relevant question about the next change in definition that should come after 100/20 Mbps. According to OpenVault, over 80% of U.S. homes already subscribe to download speeds of 200 Mbps or faster, and that suggests that 100 Mbps download is already behind the market. The NOI should be discussing when the definition ought to be increased to 200 or 300 Mbps download instead of a theoretical future definition change.

Setting a future theoretical speed goal is a feel-good exercise to make it sound like FCC policy will somehow influence the forward march of technology upgrades. This is exactly the sort of thing that talking-head policy folks do when they create 5-year and 10-year broadband plans. But I find it impossible to contemplate that the FCC will change the definition of broadband to gigabit speeds in the next decade, because doing so would be saying that every home that doesn’t have a gigabit option would not have broadband. Without that possibility, setting a high target goal is largely meaningless.

The NOI also asks if the FCC should somehow consider latency and packet loss – and the answer is that of course they should. However, they can’t completely punt on the issue like they do today when FCC grants and subsidies only require a latency under 100 milliseconds and set no standards for packet loss. Setting latency requirements that everybody except high-orbit satellites can easily meet is like having no standard at all.

Of interest to rural folks is a long discussion in the NOI about raising the definition of cellular broadband from today’s paltry 5/1 Mbps. Mobile speeds in most cities have download speeds today greater than 150 Mbps, often faster. The NOI suggests that a definition of mobile broadband ought to be something like 35/3 Mbps – something that is far slower than what a urban folks can already receive. But talking about a definition of mobile broadband ignores that any definition of mobile broadband is meaningless in the huge areas of the country where there is practically no mobile broadband coverage.

One of the questions I find most annoying asks if the FCC should measure broadband success by the number of ISPs available at a given location. This is the area where the FCC broadband maps are the most deficient. I wrote a recent blog that highlighted that seven or eight of the ten ISPs that claim coverage at my house aren’t real broadband options. Absolutely nobody is analyzing or challenging the maps for ISPs in cities that claim coverage that is either slower than claimed or doesn’t exist. But it’s good policy fodder for the FCC to claim that many folks in cities have a dozen broadband options. If it were only so.

Probably the most important question asked in the NOI is what the FCC should do about the millions of homes that can’t afford broadband. The FCC asks if it should adopt a universal service goal. This question has activated the lobbyists of the big ISPs who are shouting that the NOI is proof that the FCC wants to regulate and lower broadband rates. The big ISPs don’t even want the FCC to compile and publish data that compares broadband penetration rates to demographic data and household incomes. This NOI is probably not the right forum to ask that question – but solving the affordability gap affects far more households than the rural availability gap.

I think it’s a foregone conclusion that the FCC will use the NOI to adopt 100/20 Mbps as the definition of broadband. After all, the FCC is playing catchup to Congress, which essentially reset the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps two years ago in the BEAD grant legislation. The bigger question is if the FCC will do anything meaningful with the other questions asked in the NOI.

An Easier Way to Define Broadband

Our broadband policies always seem to lag the market. If and when the FCC seats the fifth Commissioner, it’s expected that the agency will raise the definition of broadband from 25/3 Mbps to 100/20 Mbps. That change will have big repercussions in the market because it will mean that anybody that can’t buy broadband speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps would not have broadband. That’s how an official broadband definition works – you either have broadband, or you don’t.

The definition of broadband matters for several reasons. First, it makes areas that don’t have broadband eligible for federal grants – although many of the current round of big grants did not wait for the FCC to change the definition of broadband. It also matters in how we count the number of people without broadband. That has supposedly been one of the major purposes of the FCC broadband maps, and they failed badly in identifying homes that can’t buy 25/3 broadband. But on the day that the FCC changes the definition of broadband, millions of homes will be officially declared to not be able to buy real broadband.

I’ve always hated these arbitrary hard lines defined by speeds. Anybody who has ever done speed tests at their home knows that the broadband speed delivered varies from second to second, minute to minute, and hour by hour. It’s not unusual at my desk to see speeds vary by more than 50% during the course of the day.

The original purpose for having a definition of broadband was established by Congress, which directed the FCC to have plans to bring rural broadband into parity with urban broadband. The folks that wrote that law in 1996 could never have envisioned that we’d grow from having dial-up Internet to gigabit capabilities in urban America in 2022.

If the goal is still to create parity between urban and rural broadband, there is a much easier way to define broadband. The cable companies have regularly increased the speeds of their minimum broadband products, and in my mind, when they do so, they set a new standard target for parity between rural and urban areas.

Recently both Charter and Cable One increased the minimum speeds of basic broadband to 200 Mbps (with no mention of upload speeds). Charter is increasing speeds automatically with no rate changes. Cable One’s change seems like more of a quiet rate increase since it will charge customers $5 more per month to automatically move them from 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps.

Charter has always led the industry in this. I think they were a leader in moving to 30 Mbps, 60 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and now 200 Mbps. The rest of the cable industry generally matches Charter in this increases within a year or so.

The one exception is Comcast Xfinity. The company still has a 50Mbps and a 100 Mbps product. However, if you go to the web, all they are pushing is a new 300 Mbps product. I expect it’s not easy for a new customer to buy the 50 Mbps product.

When the big cable companies voluntarily raise the speed bar by increasing speeds across the board, they have, by definition, redefined urban broadband. Can parity mean anything other than residents in a rural area should be able to buy broadband as fast as is available to a basic broadband customer in an urban area?

Maybe I’m being too simplistic, but if the FCC finally raises the definition of broadband this year to 100/20 Mbps, it will already be lagging behind the urban broadband market with that definition.

Of course, the download speed question is only half of the speed equation. You have to dig deep on cable company websites to find any mention of upload speeds. The cable companies lobbied extremely hard during the passage of broadband grant legislation to make certain that the upload speed definition for grant purposes didn’t go higher than 20 Mbps. When cable companies talk to customers, they are moot on upload speeds since few urban cable products actually deliver 20 Mbps.

I probably have written too many blogs about the definition of broadband. But it’s a topic that keeps having real-life implications. It’s ludicrous that there are still federal grants that award more money for serving areas with broadband speeds under 25/3 Mbps. If the real goal of the federal government is to have parity between rural and urban broadband speeds, then Charter and Cable One just provided us with a new definition of broadband. If somebody uses federal grant money to build a rural market with 100 Mbps download technology, it’s already out of parity in 2022, and it’s hard to imagine how far it will be out of parity by the time the grant-funded network is built and operational.

Revisiting the Definition of Broadband

There has been talk for over a year that the new FCC under Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is planning to raise the definition of broadband to 100/20 Mbps. It looks like that probably doesn’t happen until Congress approves a fifth Commissioner.

As much of a welcome relief as that would be, I think we also need to understand that a 100/20 Mbps definition of broadband is not forward-looking and will start being obsolete and too slow from the day it is approved. I’ve always argued that we need a mechanism to change the definition of broadband annually, or at least more often than we have been doing.

Consider a few facts that ought to be part of the discussion of the definition of broadband. The first is that the need for faster speeds has been growing since the 1980s, and there is no reason to think it will stop growing today. If we accept that 25 Mbps download was a decent definition of speed when it was adopted in 2015 and that 100 Mbps is a decent definition in 2022, then that is an acknowledgment that the public’s need for speed has increased by 21% annually during those years.

As it turns out if we look back at history that the demand for broadband speed has been growing at the same pace for a long time. The FCC set the definition of broadband at 200 kbps/200 kbps in 1996 and upped the definition to 4/1 Mbps in 2010. Plot those on a growth curve, and we can see the steady and inexorable growth of broadband since the dial-up days. You’d have to be a fool to think that we’ve reached the end of that growth curve. We’re finding new ways to use broadband in our homes every year, and the demand for better broadband keeps growing.

We have other evidence that the public demand for faster broadband continues to grow. That is evidenced by the new customer adoption statistics announced by OpenVault for December 31, 2021.

Dec 2021
Under 50 Mbps 9.4%
50 – 99 Mbps 7.6%
100 – 199 Mbps 36.9%
200 – 499 Mbps 28.5%
500 – 999 Mbps 5.5%
1 Gbps 12.2%

According to OpenVault, only 17% of broadband subscribers are buying broadband products with advertised speeds under 100 Mbps. 46% of all households are buying broadband of 200 Mbps or faster – and that’s going to climb quickly as the big cable companies push faster speeds on all of their customers.

What do these statistics say about using 100 Mbps download as the definition of broadband? First, I think the market has already told the FCC that 100 Mbps is quickly becoming last year’s news. Within a year, when 60% or 70% of the public is buying broadband speeds of at least 200 Mbps, it will be obvious that 100 Mbps broadband is already in the rearview mirror for most Americans.

But we can also go back to the historic growth curve. If the demand for broadband keeps growing at the rate it’s grown since 1996, then the future demand for download speeds will be as follows:

Download Speeds in Megabits / Second

2022 2023 2024 2025 2026 2027 2028
100 121 146 177 214 259 314

Hopefully, the FCC doesn’t change the definition and then rest on its laurels. Even by the time of the next presidential election, the definition ought to be 150 Mbps, and by 2028 would be expected to grow to over 300 Mbps.

Unfortunately, the definition of broadband has political and financial overtones. It determines who can win grants. A higher definition of broadband can declare that certain technologies are no longer considered to be broadband. In a perfect world, directed by the public demand for broadband, the definition of broadband would increase every year, something like the above.

 

FCC’s 2020 Look at Broadband Speeds

The FCC recently released a Notice of Inquiry asking about the state of broadband in preparation for the upcoming 2021 report to Congress. The FCC is required to annually examine the state of broadband and this is the sixteenth NOI that is the first step towards creating the annual report.

In the NOI, the FCC provides a preview of what they are planning to tell Congress in the upcoming report. The FCC continues to pat itself on the back for closing the digital divide. Consider the following facts cited by the FCC in their opening paragraphs of the NOI:

The number of Americans lacking access to fixed terrestrial broadband service of at least 25/3 Mbps continues to decline, falling more than 14% in 2018 and more than 30% between 2016 and 2018. In addition, the number of Americans without access to 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile broadband service with a median speed of at least 10/3 Mbps fell approximately 54% between 2017 and 2018. The vast majority of Americans, surpassing 85% of the population in 2018, now have access to fixed terrestrial broadband service at 250/25 Mbps, representing a 47% increase in the number of Americans with access to this speed since 2017. Over the same period, the number of Americans living in rural areas with access to such service increased by 85%. 

These statistics all sound great, but unfortunately, we can’t believe any of these claims. The FCC continues to draw conclusions based upon the badly flawed Form 477 data reported to the agency by ISPs. In every rural county I have examined, there are overstatements by ISPs of broadband speeds and availability – and those overstated coverages are included by the FCC as places that have good broadband. I’ve written blogs about entire counties that the FCC thinks haves good broadband, but where the ISP-reported broadband doesn’t exist. If the FCC’s NOI was being truthful, the above list of statistics would open with this sentence: “This report summarizes the broadband speeds and coverage that ISPs report to us. We have no way to know if any of these claims are true”.

Anybody who digs into the FCC data knows it’s terrible, but it’s impossible to know how bad it is. We get clues every time somebody takes a stab at developing a more accurate broadband map. The State of Georgia undertook a mapping effort and in July identified 507,000 homes in the state that don’t have access to 25/3 broadband. That number was 255,000 homes higher than what was shown by the FCC. If that same ratio holds everywhere in the country, then there are twice as many homes without broadband than what the FCC cites in the NOI. I think in many western states that the FCC data is even worse than what Georgia found.

What I find most troublesome about the NOI is that the FCC is planning to stick to the definition of broadband as 25/3 Mbps. It’s easy to understand why the agency wants to keep this speed as the definition of broadband. If the agency increases the definition of broadband, then overnight a whole lot more homes would be declared to not have good broadband. That would completely kill the FCC’s narrative that they are doing great work and closing the digital divide.

The FCC’s cited statistics argue against 25/3 Mbps as the right definition of broadband. Consider the statement above which says that 85% of homes have access to 250/25 Mbps broadband. If that is true, then almost by definition, the FCC’s should define broadband at least at 250/25 Mbps. After all, the FCC’s mandate from Congress is to measure and close the gap between urban and rural broadband. If urban broadband can deliver 250/25 Mbps to everybody, then by the Congressional mandate the speeds available urban America should be the target for rural America. To keep the definition at 25/3 Mbps is ignoring market reality – that most of the people in the country now have speeds far faster than the FCC’s obsolete definition of broadband. And perhaps worse of all, the FCC is drawing this conclusion based upon 2018 data. We know that homes are using roughly 50% more broadband today today than what they used in 2018.

Setting the Definition of Broadband

One of the commenters on my blog asked a good question – can’t we set the definition of broadband by looking at the broadband applications used by the typical household? That sounds like a commonsense approach to the issue and is exactly what the FCC did when they set the definition of broadband to 25/3 Mbps in 2015. They looked at combinations of applications that a typical family of four might use in an evening, with the goal that a household ought to have enough broadband to comfortably do those functions at the same time. This might best be described as a technical approach to defining broadband – look at what households are really using and make sure that the definition of broadband is large enough to cover the expected usage for a typical household.

Taking this approach raises the bigger question – what should the policy be for setting the definition of broadband? I don’t know that I have any answers, but I ask the following questions:

  • The FCC largely conducted a thought experiment when setting the 25/3 definition of broadband – they didn’t try to measure the bandwidth used in the scenarios they considered. If the FCC had measured real homes doing those functions they likely would have found that bandwidth needs were different than they had estimated. Some functions use less bandwidth than they had supposed. But usage also would have been larger than they had calculated, because the FCC didn’t compensate for WiFi overheads and machine-to-machine traffic. As a household makes use of multiple simultaneous broadband functions, the WiFi networks we all use bog down when those applications collide with each other inside the home network. The busy-hour behavior of our home networks needs to be part of a mathematical approach to measuring broadband.
  • The FCC could have gotten a better answer had they hired somebody to measure evening broadband usage in a million homes. We know that broadband usage is like anything else and there are households that barely use broadband and others that use it intentsely. The idea of pinpointing the usage of a typical family is a quaint idea when what’s needed is to understand the curve of broadband usage – what’s the percentage of homes that are light, average, and heavy users. I’m sure that one of the big companies that track broadband usage could measure this somehow. But even after making such measurements we need a policy. Should the definition of broadband be set to satisfy the biggest broadband users, or something else like the medium speed used by households? Analytics can only go so far and at some point there has to be a policy. It’s not an easy policy to establish – if the definition of broadband is set anywhere below the fastest speeds used by households, then policy makers are telling some households that they use too much broadband.
  • If we are going to use measurements to determine the definition of broadband, then this also has to be an ongoing effort. If 25/3 was the right definition of broadband in 2015, how should that definition have changed when homes routinely started watching 4K video? I don’t think anybody can deny that households use more broadband each year, and homes use applications that are more data intensive. The household need for speed definitely increases over time, so any policy for setting a definition of broadband needs to recognize that the definition must grow over time.
  • One fact that is easy to forget is that the big cable companies now serve two-thirds of the broadband customers in the country, and any discussion we have about a definition of broadband is only considering how to handle the remaining one-third of broadband users. There is a good argument to be made that the cable companies already define the ‘market’ speed of broadband. The big cable companies all have minimum broadband speeds for new customers in urban markets today between 100 – 200 Mbps. The companies didn’t set these speeds in a vacuum. The cable companies have unilaterally increased speeds every 3-4 years in response to demands from their customers for faster speeds. I think there is a valid argument to be made that the market speeds used to serve two-thirds of the customers in the country should be the target broadband speed for everybody else. Any policymaker arguing that 25/3 Mbps should still be the definition of broadband is arguing that one-third of the country should settle for second-class broadband.
  • In a related argument I harken back to a policy discussion the FCC used to have when talking about broadband speeds. I can remember a decade or more ago when the FCC generally believed that rural broadband customers deserved to have access to the same speeds as urban customers. That policy was easy to support when cable networks and telco copper networks both delivered similar speeds. However, as cable broadband technology leaped ahead of copper and DSL, these discussion disappeared from the public discourse.
  • When looking at grant programs like the upcoming RDOF program, where the funded networks won’t be completed until 2027, any definition of broadband for the grants needs to look ahead to what the speeds might be like in 2027. Unfortunately, since we can’t agree on how to set the definition of broadband today, we have no context for talking about future speeds.

These are not easy questions. If the FCC was doing its job we would be having vigorous discussions on the topic. Sadly, I don’t foresee any real discussions at the FCC about the policy for setting the definition of broadband. The FCC has hunkered down and continues to support the 25/3 definition of broadband even when it’s clear that it’s grown obsolete. This FCC is unlikely to increase the definition of broadband, because in doing so they would be declaring that millions of homes have something less than broadband. It seems that our policy for setting the definition of broadband is to keep it where it is today because that’s politically expedient.

The Definition of Broadband

When the FCC set the definition of broadband at 25/3 Mbps in January of 2015, I thought it was a reasonable definition. At the time the FCC said that 25/3 Mbps was the minimum speed that defined broadband, and anything faster than 25/3 Mbps was considered to be broadband, and anything slower wasn’t broadband.

2015 was forever ago in terms of broadband usage and there have been speed increases across the industry since then. All of the big cable companies have unilaterally increased their base broadband speeds to between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps. Numerous small telcos have upgraded their copper networks to fiber. Even the big telcos have increased speeds in rural America through CAF II upgrades that increased speeds to 10/1 Mbps – and the telcos all say they did much better in some places.

The easiest way to look at the right definition of broadband today is to begin with the 25/3 Mbps level set at the beginning of 2015. If that was a reasonable definition at the beginning of 2015, what’s a reasonable definition today? Both Cisco and Ookla track actual speeds achieved by households and both say that actual broadband speeds have been increasing nationally about 21% annually. Apply a 21% annual growth rate to the 25 Mbps download speeds set in 2015 would predict that the definition of broadband today should be 54 Mbps:

2015 2016 2017 2018 2019
25 30 37 44 54

We also have a lot of anecdotal evidence that households want faster speeds. Households have been regularly bailing on urban DSL and moving to faster cable company broadband. A lot of urban DSL can be delivered at speeds between 25 and 50 Mbps, and many homes are finding that to be inadequate. Unfortunately, the big telcos aren’t going to provide the detail needed to understand this phenomenon, but it’s clearly been happening on a big scale.

It’s a little sketchier to apply this same logic to upload speeds. There was a lot of disagreement about using the 3 Mbps download speed standard established in 2015. It seems to have been set to mollify the cable companies that wanted to assign most of their bandwidth to download. However, since 2015 most of the big cable companies have upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1 and they can now provide significantly faster uploads. My home broadband was upgraded by Charter in 2018 from 60/6 Mbps to 135/20 Mbps. It seems ridiculous to keep upload speed goals low, and if I was magically put onto the FCC, I wouldn’t support an upload speed goal of less than 20 Mbps.

You may recall that the FCC justified the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband by looking at the various download functions that could be done by a family of four. The FCC examined numerous scenarios that considered uses like video streaming, surfing the web, and gaming. The FCC scenario was naive because they didn’t account for the fact that the vast majority of homes use WiFi. Most people don’t realize that WiFi networks generate a lot of overhead due to collisions of data streams – particularly when a household is trying to do multiple big bandwidth applications at the same time. When I made my judgment about the 25/3 Mbps definition back in 2015, I accounted for WiFi overheads and I still thought that 25/3 Mbps was a reasonable definition for the minimum speed of broadband.

Unfortunately, this FCC is never going to unilaterally increase the definition of broadband, because by doing so they would reclassify millions of homes as not having broadband. The FCC’s broadband maps are dreadful, but even with the bad data, it’s obvious that if the definition of broadband was 50/20 Mbps today that a huge number of homes would fall below that target.

The big problem with the failure to recognize the realities of household broadband demand is that the FCC is using the already-obsolete definition of 25/3 Mbps to make policy decisions. I have a follow-up blog to this one that will argue that using that speed as the definition of the upcoming $20.4 billion RDOF grants will be as big of a disaster as the prior FCC decision to hand out billions to upgrade to 10/1 Mbps DSL in the CAF II program.

The fact that household broadband demand grows over time is not news. We have been on roughly the same demand curve growth since the advent of dial-up. It’s massively frustrating to see politics interfere with what is a straight engineering issue. As homes use more broadband, particularly when they want to do multiple broadband tasks at the same time, their demand for faster broadband grows. I can understand that no administration wants to recognize that things are worse than they want them to be – so they don’t want to set the definition of broadband at the right speed. But it’s disappointing to see when the function of the FCC is supposed to be to make sure that America gets the broadband infrastructure it needs. If the agency was operated by technologists instead of political appointees we wouldn’t even be having this debate.

Upgrading Broadband Speeds

A few weeks ago Charter increased my home broadband speeds from 60 Mbps to 130 Mbps with no change in price. My upload speed seems to be unchanged at 10 Mbps. Comcast is in the process of speed upgrades and is increasing base speeds to between 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps download speeds in various markets.

I find it interesting that while the FCC is having discussions about keeping the definition of broadband at 25 Mbps that the big cable companies – these two alone have over 55 million broadband customers – are unilaterally increasing broadband speeds.

These companies aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but for business reasons. First, I imagine that this is a push to sharpen the contrast with DSL. There are a number of urban markets where customers can buy 50 Mbps DSL from AT&T and others and this upgrade opens up a clear speed difference between cable broadband and DSL.

However, I think the main reason they are increasing speeds is to keep customers happy. This change was done quietly, so I suspect that most people had no idea that the change was coming. I also suspect that most people don’t regularly do speed tests and won’t know about the speed increase – but many of them will notice better performance.

One of the biggest home broadband issues is inadequate WiFi, with out-of-date routers or poor router placement degrading broadband performance. Pushing faster speeds into the house can overcome some of these WiFi issues.

This should be a wake-up call to everybody else in the industry to raise their speeds. There are ISPs and overbuilders all across the country competing against the giant cable companies and they need to immediately upgrade speeds or lose the public relations battle in the market place. Even those who are not competing against these companies need to take heed, because any web search is going to show consumers that 100 Mbps broadband or greater is now the new standard.

These unilateral changes make a mockery of the FCC. It’s ridiculous to be having discussions about setting the definition of broadband at 25 Mbps when the two biggest ISPs in the country have base product speeds 5 to 8 times faster than that. States with broadband grant programs also have the speed conversation and this will hopefully alert them that the new goal for broadband needs to be at least 100 Mbps.

These speed increases were inevitable. We’ve known for decades that the home demand for broadband has been doubling every three years. When the FCC first started talking about 25 Mbps as the definition of acceptable broadband, the math said that within six years we’d be having the same discussion about 100 Mbps broadband – and here we are having that discussion.

The FCC doesn’t want to recognize the speed realities in the world because they are required by law to try to bring rural speeds to be par with urban speeds. But this can’t be ignored because these speed increases are not just for bragging rights. We know that consumers find ways to fill faster data pipes. Just two years ago I saw articles wondering if there was going to be any market for 4K video. Today, that’s the first thing offered to me on both Amazon Prime and Netflix. They shoot all new programming in 4K and offer it at the top of their menus. It’s been reported that at the next CES electronics shows there will be several companies pushing commercially available 8K televisions. This technology is going to require a broadband connection between 60 Mbps and 100 Mbps depending upon the level of screen action. People are going to buy these sets and then demand programming to use them – and somebody will create the programming.

8K video is not the end game. Numerous companies are working on virtual presence where we will finally be able to converse with a hologram of somebody as if they were in the same room. Early versions of this technology, which ought to be available soon will probably use the same range of bandwidth as 8K video, but I’ve been reading about near-future technologies that will produce realistic holograms and that might require as much as a 700 Mbps connection – perhaps the first real need for gigabit broadband.

While improving urban data speeds is great, every increase in urban broadband speeds highlights the poor condition of rural broadband. While urban homes are getting 130 – 200 Mbps for decent prices there are still millions of homes with either no broadband or with broadband at speeds of 10 Mbps or less. The gap between urban and rural broadband is growing wider every year.

If you’ve been reading this blog you know I don’t say a lot of good things about the big cable companies. But kudos to Comcast and Charter for unilaterally increasing broadband speeds. Their actions speak louder than anything that we can expect out of the FCC.

Setting the FCC Definition of Broadband

In the recently released 2018 Broadband Progress Report the FCC reluctantly kept the official definition of broadband at 25/3 Mbps. I say reluctantly because three of the Commissioners were on record for either eliminating the standard altogether or else reverting back to the older definition of 10/1 Mbps.

I’m guessing the Commissioners gave in to a lot of public pressure to keep the 25/3 standard. Several Commissioners had also taken a public stance that they wanted to allow cellular data to count the same for a household as landline broadband – and that desire was a big factor in lowering the definition since cellphones rarely meet the 25/3 speed standard.

The deliberation on the topic this year raises the question if there is some way to create a rule that would better define the speed of needed broadband. It’s worth looking back to see how the Tom Wheeler FCC came up with the 25/3 definition. They created sample profiles of the way that households of various sizes are likely to want to use broadband. In doing so, they added together the bandwidth needed for various tasks such as watching a movie or supporting a cellphone.

But the FCC’s method was too simple and used the assumption that various simultaneous uses of broadband are additive. They added together the uses for a typical family of four which resulted in bandwidth needs greater than 20 Mbps download, and used that as the basis for setting the 25/3 standard. But that’s now home broadband works. There are several factors that affect the actual amount of bandwidth being used:

For example, doing simultaneous tasks on a broadband network increases the overhead on the home network. If you are watching a single Netflix stream, the amount of needed bandwidth is predictable and steady. But if three people in a home are each watching a different Netflix the amount of needed bandwidth is greater than adding together the three theoretical streams. When your ISP and your home router try to receive and untangle multiple simultaneous streams there are collisions of packets that get lost and which have to be retransmitted. This is described as adding ‘overhead’ to the transmission process. Depending on the nature of the data streams the amount of collision overhead can be significant.

Almost nobody directly wires the signal from their ISP directly too all of their devices. Instead we use WiFi to move data around to various devices in the home. A WiFi router has an overhead of its own that adds to the overall bandwidth requirement. As I’ve covered in other blogs, a WiFi network is not impacted only by the things you are trying to do in your home, but a WiFi network is slowed when it pauses to recognizes demands for connection from your neighbor’s WiFi network.

Any definition of home broadband needs should reflect these overheads. If a household actually tries to download 25 Mbps of usage from half a dozen sources at the same time on a 25 Mbps, the various overheads and collisions will nearly crash the system.

The FCC’s definition of broadband also needs to reflect the real world. For example, most of the unique programming created by Netflix and Amazon Prime are now available in 4K. I bought a large TV last year and we now watch 4K when it’s available. That means a stream of 15-20 Mbps download. That stream forced me to upgrade my home WiFi network to bring a router into the room with the TV.

The FCC’s speed definition finally needs to consider the busy hour of the day – the time when a household uses the most broadband. That’s the broadband speed that the home needs.

We know household bandwidth needs keep increasing. Ten years ago I was happy with a 5 Mbps broadband product. Today I have a 60 Mbps product that seems adequate, but I know from tests I did last year that I would be unhappy with a 25 Mbps connection.

The FCC needs a methodology that would somehow measure actual download speeds at a number of homes over time to understand what homes area really using for bandwidth. There are ways that this could be done. For example, the FCC could do something similar for broadband like what Nielsen does for cable TV. The FCC could engage one of the industry firms that monitor broadband usage such as Akamai to sample a large number of US homes. There could be sample voluntary homes that meet specific demographics that would allow monitoring of their bandwidth usage. The accumulated data from these sample homes would provide real-life bandwidth usage as a guide to setting the FCC’s definition of broadband. Rather than changing the official speed periodically, the FCC could change the definition as needed as dictated by the real-world data.

The FCC does some spot checking today of the broadband speeds as reported by the ISPs that feed the national broadband map. But that sampling is random and periodic and doesn’t provide the same kind of feedback that a formal ongoing measuring program would show. We have tools that could give the FCC the kind of feedback it needs. Of course, there are also political and other factors used in setting the official definition of broadband, and so perhaps the FCC doesn’t want real facts to get into the way.

The FCC Process

I recently wrote a blog that discussed the possibility that the FCC would change the definition of the speed that constitutes broadband. I got a number of inquiries from readers asking how this could happen outside of the scope of the formal rulemaking process. Specifically, I had reported on the rumor that the FCC was likely to make this decision by February 3, which is not one of the dates when the FCC formally holds open meetings and votes on changes to FCC rules. Today I’m going to try to shed some light on how the FCC makes decisions, which will hopefully clarify the issue.

The FCC has several paths to make decisions. The one that the industry is most familiar with is the rulemaking process. The basic process for rulemaking for all administrative government agencies was created with the Administrative Procedure Act in 1946. This Act defined a process of changing federal rules that mandates getting feedback from the public.

The FCC might consider changing rules for several reasons. Some rule changes are mandated by Congress, with one of the more recent such FCC actions being in response to changes in consumer privacy rules. The FCC can also start a rulemaking in response to a petition asking for a clarification of the rules. In the past such petitions often came from the large carriers or else from state regulators. Finally, the FCC can simply identify an industry problem on their own and begin the rulemaking process to seek possible solutions.

The FCC then has several tools available to facilitate the rulemaking process:

  • One tool available to the FCC is the NOI (Notice of Inquiry). This can be done when the FCC is trying to understand an issue and the possible solutions.
  • But the NOI process is not mandatory and the agency can move directly to an NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking). This is a formal document that proposes specific rule changes. There is a defined minimum timeline for this process that includes time for the public to comment and for a second round of reply comments, if needed. During this process the FCC might allow ex parte meetings from interested parties, hold public meetings to solicit feedback or engage with industry experts to get feedback on their proposals.
  • Finally, some dockets proceed to an FNPRM (Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking). This tool is used when the comments on an NPRM cause the FCC to consider a different solution than what they originally proposed. This also then goes through the public comment process.

But not everything done at the FCC goes through the rulemaking process. For example, one of the mandated functions of the FCC is acting to adjudicate industry disputes. Industry parties that disagree on the interpretation of existing FCC rules can ask the agency to clarify – and in the case the agency takes on a nearly judicial role in looking at the facts of a specific case.

Finally, the FCC has a major administrative function. The agency has to make numerous policy decisions in order to meet its mandates from Congress. A simple way to think about this is that the rulemaking process creates formal rule changes. But then the agency must develop the processes and policies to make the new rules function. The FCC spends a lot of time on these administrative functions. For example, holding auctions for spectrum is an administrative function. Deciding how to fund and administer the Universal Service Fund is an administrative function. Approving new telecom and wireless devices is an administrative function.

The decision in the past to define the speed of broadband was an administrative decision. The agency has wide discretion to arbitrarily define administrative rules, but they often ask for public feedback.

The speed of broadband has been discussed at the FCC in several different contexts. First, the FCC has administered several grant programs and they decided that it was in the public good to set minimum broadband speeds for various grant programs. For example, the CAF II program requires the large telcos to deploy technology that delivers at least 10/1 Mbps. But there have been other speed requirements for other grant programs and the ‘experimental grants’ of a few years ago looked to fund technologies that delivered at least 100 Mbps download.

But the primary reason that the FCC decided they needed to define broadband using speeds was due to a mandate from Congress for the FCC is to report once per year on the state of broadband in the country. The Congress wants to know how many people have, or do not have broadband. Past FCCs decided that a definition of broadband was needed in order to create a meaningful report to Congress. They initially set the definition of broadband at 10/1 Mbps and later raised it to 25/3 Mbps. And they purposefully have excluded cellular broadband as not being broadband.

In anticipation of each annual broadband report the FCC sometimes asks questions of the public. They did so last year in an NOI where they asked if the 25/3 Mbps definition of broadband is too high. And they asked if cellular broadband ought to now be counted as broadband. This NOI is issued only for factfinding and to solicit public opinion on the topic. But the speed of broadband is an administrative decision of the agency, meaning that there are not formal rules associated with setting or changing the definition of broadband. The agency is free to make changes at any time to these kinds of administrative definitions. In the past the definition of broadband speeds was included with the annual broadband reports issued to Congress. And the anticipation is that the agency will use this same mechanism this year. There is no formal docket open on the topic and thus no formal and public vote is required. The FCC might or might not change the definition of broadband, but as my blog conjectured, the consensus of industry experts is that they are likely to do so. But we’ll have to wait for the annual broadband report to see if they actually lower the definition of broadband speeds or add cellular data to the definition.