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Kevin Hamm was all ears when news broke that U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont, was arguing against raising the bar on what Internet companies can pass off as “high-speed” service.

Just two years ago, Hamm and some friends were so frustrated by the speed of local Internet service in Helena that they formed their own company, Treasure State Internet.

Daines was being skewered in publications like “The Hill” for penning a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, dated Jan. 21, about setting arbitrarily high minimum speeds for high-speed Internet.

At issue is the minimum high-speed Internet speed of 25 megabits per second, or Mbps, set by the FCC. Any download speed slower than the standard wouldn’t be considered high speed. In Montana, only 13 percent of the public gets as fast as the FCC minimum, which was set in early 2015. The rest of the state is merging onto the information superhighway at wagon-trail speeds.

The nugget from the Daines letter that netizens seized upon suggested the new FCC minimum was really faster than what’s necessary.