GoKawiilIt’s just one word, but it changes everything. In its latest broadband deployment report, the FCC quietly backpedaled on its mission to expand high-speed internet to every American and eliminated an ambitious gig-speed goal entirely.
“High-speed broadband is often essential to full participation in modern society,” the opening sentence of the Aug. 14 report reads.
That sounds pretty uncontroversial at first glance, but it stands in stark contrast to the previous report issued under President Joe Biden’s FCC, which called access to affordable, reliable broadband “essential to full participation in modern life.” The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres went even further, calling the issue “a matter of life and death” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That word ‘often’ — the fifth word in the whole report — just sets the entire tone that suddenly broadband is not as important as it was five years ago,” Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State University, told CNET.
These FCC reports are mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act to evaluate whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are available to “all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” Today, that’s commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the gulf between people with a modern internet connection and those without. President Donald Trump’s FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, stopped just short of declaring the mission accomplished.
“The digital divide is rapidly closing. And a range of data sets show that speeds are up, prices are down, and competition is intensifying,” Carr said in a statement.
The report says that 96.9% of Americans now have access to speeds of 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload, which the Commission adopted as its standard for broadband in 2024. But those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as they’re self-reported by internet service providers.
“I still think there are ISPs reporting exactly 100/20Mbps speed capability to the FCC while delivering something slower,” Doug Dawson, a longtime expert in broadband and author of the industry blog Pots and Pans, wrote in a post on the report.
Carr voted against the 100/20Mbps standard when it passed two years ago, and he took particular exception with the FCC’s long-term goal of increasing the standard to 1,000/500Mbps, calling it a “Trojan Horse to exclude fixed wireless” that would inevitably lead to “wasteful overbuilding” in his dissenting statement.
That gig-speed goal is now scrapped. In its annual report on the state of broadband deployment, the Commission argued that the long-term goal of 1,000Mbps download and 500Mbps upload speed was unfairly biased against slower technologies like fixed wireless and satellite.
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