In the great debate over how to get affordable high speed Internet into the hands of every American, one of the biggest bones of contention is defining the baseline standard for broadband. The Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan calls for getting 100Mbps access to at least 100 million US homes by 2020, and universal access at the rate of at minimum 4Mbps actual download speed for all consumers by that same year.

The 4Mbps goal represents a speed "comparable to what the typical broadband subscriber receives today, and what many consumers are likely to use in the future, given past growth rates," the NBP contends.

The Plan estimates that 95 percent of the US populace (290 million Americans) dwell in a residence with access to "terrestrial, fixed broadband infrastructure capable of supporting actual download speeds of at least 4Mbps." But that doesn't mean that they've actually got such service in their homes. So the document's components, being rolled out by the FCC over this year and next, focuses on ways to get it to them.

But as we've reported, key figures on Capitol Hill have been skeptical of the 100Mbps and 4Mbps goals. "What is the FCC's rationale for a vision that appears to be firmly rooted in the second tier of countries?" asked Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI) in a set of pointed questions for the agency. "Why did the plan settle on the download speed of 4MB by 2020?" added Senator Mark Begich (D-AK). "It seems a bit modest for a goal."

Now the author of the plan has released a new report on broadband adoption that defends this figure. Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute, concedes in his paper for the Knight Foundation that "critics may suggest that the 4/1 offering is not sufficiently ambitious."

But the benchmark doesn't represent a target for most of the country, Levin notes. Rather it functions as the minimum technical requirement for receiving public support for building and operating privately owned ISPs "in markets where market forces will not otherwise provide broadband networks."

Highest target

Second, Levin adds, "this goal, in fact, is one of the highest universal targets anywhere in the world." Here are some selected rows from a table of national broadband goals that he provides. (The speeds are all downloads.)

Country "Universal" availability target Type of speed Date United States 4 Mbps Actual 2020 Rep. of Korea 1 Mbps (99%) Actual 2008 Finland 1 Mbps Actual 2009 Denmark 0.5 Mbps Unspecified 2010 Ireland 1 Mbps Unspecified 2010 France 0.5 Mbps Unspecified 2010 Germany 1 Mbps Unspecified 2010 Australia 12 Mbps Unspecified 2018 United Kingdom 2 Mbps Unspecified 2012

Third, the 4Mbps goal should be reevaluated every five years, Levin's report recommends. Ultimately, like the FCC Plan that he drafted, he thinks the various components of the Universal Service Fund, which currently support phone service in rural and low-income areas, should be transitioned over to funding ISPs and low income broadband subscribers. The question is at what minimal broadband rate should that support be forthcoming.

Future developments

There are also critics who think that 4Mbps is too high a figure, albeit in other contexts. The cable industry hit the ceiling when the FCC recently concluded that broadband rollout isn't happening quickly enough, using that benchmark as a standard. High speed Internet "remains unavailable" to between 14 million and 24 million Americans and is not being delivered in a "reasonable and timely fashion," the agency warned.

The report ruffled feathers by raising the definition of broadband from 200Kbps (downloads and uploads), the standard for the first report released in 1999, to 4Mbps uploads and 1Mbps downloads. 4Mbps is the "minimum speed required to stream a high-quality—even if not high-definition—video while leaving sufficient bandwidth for basic web browsing and e-mail, a common mode of broadband usage today," the document noted.

No fair, protested the National Cable and Telecommunications Association: "While the Commission's stated intent and definition of broadband properly considered future developments, it then relied on 18-month old data to determine whether those admittedly forward-looking objectives had already been achieved. Given this fundamental mismatch, it is wholly unsurprising that its answer was no."

How fast should our ISP service be? 4Mbps sits at the center of that debate.