The next edition of the Federal Communications Commission’s broadband expansion progress report is going to paint a rosier reality than usual, if a proposal being put to a vote at next month’s meeting gets a pass.
The FCC announced the agenda [PDF] for its August meeting late last week, within which were plans [PDF] to change the reporting process for Section 706. That’s a provision of a part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that requires the agency to issue an annual report as to whether carriers are deploying advanced broadband internet “in a reasonable and timely fashion” across the United States.
The report has also been a way for the US government to define what it considers to be high-speed internet. Last year the commission said standard broadband speeds were now 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up, after years of a 35/3 Mbps benchmark.
But in this year’s proposal, the new FCC says that it is seeking comment on the 100/20 Mbps speed. And it definitely wants to toss out the old commission’s goal of eventually hitting 1 Gbps/500 Mbps.
“Maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers,” the FCC argues in its proposal. “It would also appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner.”
Since satellite and fixed wireless carriers don’t offer those speeds, the FCC would have to favor other technologies if they uphold the Biden-era broadband goals.
Planned, unaffordable broadband to count toward households served
The new FCC also disagrees with how the old commission added “several extraneous universal service criteria” into last year’s 706 inquiry “based upon its interpretation of Congressional intent” that affected how the report measured whether homes had broadband access or not.
According to the proposal, the 2024 report was the first one to incorporate criteria including deployment, adoption, affordability, availability, and equitable access. The new FCC is only interested in one of those.
“The statute identifies ‘availability’ – and ‘availability’ alone – as the object of the Commission’s section 706 inquiry,” the proposal says. If something is on offer but not affordable, then one could argue it isn’t available. We asked the FCC about this issue, but didn’t hear back by publication time.
In addition to the elimination of pricing and other factors from the report, the proposal also advocates that incomplete broadband projects should still be counted as serving US households. The commission argues that the 2024 report’s focus on “whether it already has been deployed … disregarded Congress’s use of the present tense in ‘is being deployed.'”
If an incomplete project still counts toward expansion numbers, expect the 2025 report to be considerably padded compared to last year’s assessment [PDF], which found that broadband expansion goals hadn’t been met.
While a padded report might make the FCC look like it’s accomplishing its objectives, it won’t do much to help US residents stuck with slow or nonexistent broadband service.
Broadband expansion in the US has been a long, slow process that has faced repeated delays thanks in part to bad actors within the industry. Uncertainty over the funding of Biden-era programs like the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program under Trump haven’t helped matters, either.
Add softer FCC reporting standards to the mix, and that broadband expansion looks ever more like it’s never going to happen. ®
