In the 2018 report, Pai's office concedes that "Mobile services are not full substitutes for fixed services -- there are salient differences between the two technologies." Beyond the obvious difference that only one of the technologies is, you know, mobile the report points out that "there are clear variations in consumer preferences and demands for fixed and mobile services." In this context, what constitutes broadband is benchmarked by the 25/3 rule -- that is, speeds have to hit 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up.

As a result of that admission, the draft report urges that the commission evaluate the progress in deploying both mobile internet and fixed broadband services. However, in the very next breath the report states that it "takes a holistic view of the market and examines whether we are both making progress in deploying fixed broadband service and making progress in deploying mobile broadband service." Which sounds a whole lot like the FCC is still trying to treat mobile and broadband as one and the same, at least in how it measures deployment rates.

The rest of the report laid out the FCC's efforts to promote broadband deployment as required by the law, with no small amount of self-congratulation about voting to overturn Net Neutrality protections, before declaring that the commission "is now meeting its statutory mandate to encourage the deployment of broadband on a reasonable and timely basis."

Pai even managed to sneak in some spurious claims about deployment slowing under the neutrality rules. "The draft report indicates that the pace of both fixed and mobile broadband deployment declined dramatically in the two years following the prior Commission's Title II Order," he wrote in his Chairman's statement.

Mignon L. Clyburn, the same FCC Commissioner who was having none of Pai's shenanigans during the initial net neutrality debates, offered a dissenting opinion: