FCC Launches Inquiry to Increase Minimum Broadband Speed Benchmark, Set Gigabit Future Goal

The Federal Communications Commission launched an inquiry to kick off the agency’s evaluation of the state of broadband across the country, as required by section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. As part of this inquiry, the FCC will focus on the universal service goals of section 706—universal deployment, affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access to broadband throughout the United States. In light of the increasing uses and demands for broadband and the Congressional directives embodied in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which includes the largest ever federal investment in broadband deployment, this Notice of Inquiry (NOI) will take a fresh look at the FCC’s standards for evaluating broadband deployment and availability, the quality of the FCC’s available data, and the framework that the agency uses to make a finding under section 706. In addition to focusing on a universal service standard, the NOI proposes to increase the national fixed broadband speed benchmark to 100 megabits per second for download and 20 megabits per second for upload, and discusses a range of evidence supporting this standard. The FCC previously set the benchmark at 25/3 Mbps in 2015 and has not updated it since. The NOI also seeks comment on setting a separate national goal of 1 Gbps/500 Mbps for the future. This inquiry will be the first to use the new Broadband Data Collection (BDC) data. The FCC will examine how improvements to its data collection may impact the standards and inform the agency’s conclusions about broadband availability.