FCC charged with ensuring broadband access rolled out in ‘reasonable and timely’ manner but last report found 19m Americans didn’t have high-speed internet

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) looks set to redefine what high-speed internet means on Thursday in a vote that has angered the cable industry.

One of the FCC’s duties it to make sure that broadband internet services are being deployed across the US. It has the power to enforce upgrades if it feels broadband is not being deployed in a timely manner.

Broadband internet is currently defined by the regulator as 4 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 1Mbps for uploads, a standard set in 2010 that is well below the current national average of 32.4Mbps downloads and 9.9Mbps uploads, as measured by broadband tester Ookla.

But many areas of the US still have poor internet access. Under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC is charged by Congress with ensuring that broadband access is rolled out in a “reasonable and timely” manner. Its last report on the subject found 19m Americans still did not have access to high speed internet.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler wants to update the definition of what constitutes broadband to 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads, a move that could give the regulator greater authority to force upgrades from internet service providers.

In a letter to the regulator, the cable industry’s largest lobby group, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), called the FCC’s new definitions “entirely out of step” with consumer demands and said they “exaggerate the amount of bandwidth needed by the typical broadband user”.

In a blog post, it said the consumers were accessing the internet through wired and wireless connections at varying speeds and FCC’s definition excluded services “relied on by tens of millions of customers” that did not need the higher speeds suggested by the FCC. The NCTA said the number of people using broadband has consistently increased over time and it was “laughable” to suggest the cable industry “doesn’t want to deliver consumers faster speeds or improved infrastructure”.

“It’s kind of like doing a survey of the automotive business but excluding cars that get less than 50 miles per gallon,” the NCTA said.

The meeting comes at a sensitive moment for the cable industry. Next month, the FCC will vote on net neutrality rules that are expected to more tightly regulate the industry.

John Bergmayer, senior staff attorney at non-profit media watchdog Public Knowledge, said the FCC had been lax in failing to update its definition of broadband. “Slower speeds may have made sense when the FCC first started tracking broadband, but we’ve moved a long way since then.”

Given that three of the five voting commissioners, including Wheeler, are Democrats, Bergmayer said he expected the proposal to pass. He said the new definition would allow the FCC to more easily challenge arguments made by cable providers that the market is already competitive enough.

US broadband speeds are slow by global standards. Analyst Ookla’s Net Index ranks the US 25th in the world for download speeds, behind leaders Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan in Asia as well as European countries including Sweden, Iceland and France.

Google announced a further roll-out of its high speed internet service, Google Fiber, this week. The service offers speeds of 1 gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, a second. The internet company is planning to offer the service in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham. It is already available in in Kansas City, Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah.

However, the scale of Google Fiber is tiny compared to the reach of cable giants Comcast and Time Warner. The two are currently pushing through a merger that would, if approved, give them control of 47% of the broadband market.