The FCC Is Preparing To Weaken the Definition of Broadband (dslreports.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from DSLReports: Under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, the FCC is required to consistently measure whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans uniformly and "in a reasonable and timely fashion." If the FCC finds that broadband isn't being deployed quickly enough to the public, the agency is required by law to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." Unfortunately whenever the FCC is stocked by revolving door regulators all-too-focused on pleasing the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Comcast -- this dedication to expanding coverage and competition often tends to waver.

What's more, regulators beholden to regional duopolies often take things one-step further -- by trying to manipulate data to suggest that broadband is faster, cheaper, and more evenly deployed than it actually is. We saw this under former FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry), and more recently when the industry cried incessantly when the base definition of broadband was bumped to 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream. We're about to see this effort take shape once again as the FCC prepares to vote in February for a new proposal that would dramatically weaken the definition of broadband. How? Under this new proposal, any area able to obtain wireless speeds of at least 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps would be deemed good enough for American consumers, pre-empting any need to prod industry to speed up or expand broadband coverage.

Comments

Re:Bastardizing terminology

[Jesus_666]

"Boadband" has never been particularly well defined. It can be used to mean "wideband", it can be used to mean "every signal that isn't passband" and it can be used to mean "every signal that occupies multiple non-masking channels". All of those definitions are correct. The meaning of "transmission speeds generally considered fast" has been in general use for well over two decades now, making it about as uncontroversial as the use of "to hack" in a context that doesn't involve an axe.

Broadband has never had anything to do with FDM specifically. Or rather, there have always been definitions of the term that didn't have anything to do with FDM.

Re:The Heart of the Problem

[TheRaven64]

You might want to look up the term 'natural monopoly'. Even in places where there is no legally enforced local monopoly, you almost always see a monopoly or, at best, a duopoly. Laying cable to houses is expensive. You typically only see a return on investment after 5-10 years. That's fine for a telecoms or cable monopoly, because they know that in 10 years they'll still be the default choice for you (or, at worst, they have a 50-50 chance of being your first choice, so if they install 100 lines they'll expect at least 50 customers). It's not a great business model for anyone else.

In the UK, the places where we have a duopoly exist because the government prevented our national telco monopoly from offering TV services, which allowed a bunch of regional monopoly cable companies to start up. We only saw two trying to compete in a handful of places, because it's very hard to compete with an incumbent and much cheaper to start a new company somewhere where there isn't competition. These local monopolies gradually merged and now we have precisely one cable company for the entire country.

The biggest improvement to competition for our ISPs came from two things. The first was splitting the telco monopoly into wholesale and retail arms, with a requirement that the wholesale arm offers other ISPs access to their products at the same rate that they offer them to their retail arm (this at least gives us the illusion of competition, though you really have lots of companies offering basically the same thing for basically the same price, with the price set by a third party).

The other thing was the legal enforcement of local loop unbundling, where third parties were allowed to install their own equipment to terminate the last mile connections at exchanges. This has allowed some companies to offer a competing service, run over the same last mile as the incumbent telco, but with their own back-haul and so on. It's fairly limited though, because it requires quite a large investment at the exchange and is only worth doing if you have a lot of customers wanting to switch in an area. It's completely unavailable in the rural areas with the worst service.

If you think you can make money as an ISP laying your own network, then you're very welcome to come to the UK and try it. The government won't get in your way, and may even pay you to connect up people in certain areas. You might find it difficult to get investors though, because aside from a few small companies in very dense areas (there's one FTTP company in the middle of London with a few thousand customers, which currently offers the fastest speeds of any UK ISP), everyone else who has tried has failed.