Urban and Rural Speed Parit

Over 81% of US households are now subscribed to a broadband speed of at least 200 Mbps. But broadband providers think that we are fixated too much on speed and that consumers don’t need faster speeds – they think that the marketing departments of the big providers have just convinced folks that faster speeds are important. But when talking about rural versus urban broadband speeds, the discussion can’t only be about what people need or don’t need. There was an edict from Congress in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that directed the Federal Communications Commission to have parity between urban and rural broadband. There has been no change of law that has softened this mandate, so it’s still something that the FCC should be following. However, the FCC has repeatedly ignored this mandate. What's worse, the national definition of broadband still sits at a ridiculous speed of 25/3 Mbps. According to OpenVault's latest statistics, only 4.7% of households with broadband are subscribed to speeds under 50 Mbps. That number doesn’t include rural households who can’t buy broadband because there is no reasonable option where they live – but still, the number of households that are using slow speeds has gotten to be a small fraction of broadband users. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel suggested that the definition of broadband should be updated to 100 Mbps download. The OpenVault statistics now put that speed in the rearview window. Any federal definition of broadband has to be at least 200 Mbps. I really hate the numbers game with broadband, and no matter how we define broadband or set a cutoff for grant eligibility, there will be ISPs that will exaggerate the speeds of their current or planned technology to try to game the system. But the one thing we should stop doing is measuring broadband by standards that are already in the past in the real world