The Federal Definition of Broadband

The definition of broadband in the Notice of Funds Available (NOFA) (large file here) is 768 Kbps downstream and 200 Kbps upstream.

This definition is out of date. In a complaint in 2005, S. Derek Turner of the Free Press noted in a report that Canada defined broadband as 1.5 Mbps in both directions.

In the past, the definition of broadband was cut low to satisfy the demands of cable operators, who at the time had not built an architecture that could sustain high upload speeds.

At the present time, cable and telephone companies are delivering speeds far higher than those defined as broadband by the NOFA. Even mobile wireless services can achieve double the speeds described in the definition, both in upload and in download speeds, although mobile wireless networks are not built to handle significant demand (see the David Isenberg blog post When is normal use a DOS attack? for one example).

A poor definition of broadband encourages the wrong kind of innovation. There are serious class and race issues on the internet, but this definition encourages most companies to build a slow tier that will deliver cheap service to poor people and to the elderly.

Such a service would satisfy the agencies' goals as they have defined them, but fail to deliver long term growth. Instead, the services built would be obsolete fast, unable to handle the demands of the services of the future such as rich media, medical imaging, the sharing of business presentations -- and participating in government by using the Obama administration's trasparency sites, such as broadband.gov and recovery.gov.

The government can do better -- and it will do better if it funds those companies that promise to deliver real broadband highways, not the slow roads that the NOFA allows.