FCC: 68% Of U.S. Connections Slower
New data (pdf) from the FCC suggests that most consumers aren't getting speeds that technically adhere to the agency's new definition of broadband …
Context & Ripple Effects
The figure lands in the middle of a deliberately activist year at the FCC: the National Broadband Plan was already flagged back in March 2010 as facing opposition and needing years to implement, Chairman Julius Genachowski said in November that the joint Google/Verizon net neutrality proposal had slowed his regulatory push, and in September the agency opened vacant TV-band spectrum to unlicensed use — a win Microsoft and Google had lobbied for.
Against that backdrop, the finding that 68% of U.S. connections fall below the FCC's own new broadband definition does real work: it converts 'broadband' from a carrier marketing term into a government-measured benchmark, and hands the agency quantitative cover for the neutrality, spectrum, and deployment fights it is already wading into.
First-order effects
- Carriers selling 'up-to' speed tiers immediately face an official benchmark that most delivered connections miss, forcing a choice between network upgrades and restructured tiers built around actual throughput.
- Genachowski's FCC gains a defensible empirical baseline for the regulatory agenda it has been assembling all year, from neutrality rules — still only rumored as of early December — to spectrum reallocation.
Second-order effects
- Unlicensed white-space spectrum, opened to Microsoft, Google and others in September, becomes more attractive as an alternative access path precisely because wired incumbent delivery lags the new federal bar.
- Benchmark-based reporting pushes competition onto delivered-versus-advertised performance, pressuring ISPs on pricing structure rather than headline megabits.
Third-order effects
- If the definitional-ratchet pattern holds, every future reset reclassifies existing infrastructure overnight, turning the FCC's benchmark cadence into the de facto driver of national deployment priorities across the multi-year horizon the National Broadband Plan anticipated.
- Government speed measurement is positioned to institutionalize as recurring public data, shifting accountability in the market from advertised specs to audited performance.
The trend: U.S. broadband policy is shifting from accepting ISP-marketed speed labels to a government-defined, periodically raised benchmark that determines what counts as adequate service.