Broadband Definitions
(Excerpt from the Baller Herbst report)
The term “broadband” has many technical, legal, political, and commercial meanings. Each is the subject of heated controversy in the United States and abroad. The term “broadband” is generally understood to mean a service or facility that allows a human user or device to send or receive “digital” data over “the Internet” at “high speed.”
Another common term used to describe the information-carrying capacity of broadband is “bandwidth.” According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), “bandwidth” is “the capacity of a telecom line to carry signals. The necessary bandwidth is the amount of spectrum required to transmit the signal without distortion or loss of information.”
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Another useful definition is “the width of the frequency band used to transmit data. The broader the bandwidth, the faster the connection.”18
To compare bandwidths, practitioners sometimes refer to “pipes,” with data-carrying capacity growing with the “fatness” of the pipe. For example, a dial-up “pipe” is often compared to a drinking straw; a DSL, CMS or wireless “pipe” to a garden hose; and a fiber-optic “pipe” to a fire hose. Until recently, the FCC used the terms “broadband” and “high-speed Internet access” interchangeably to describe services or facilities that have the capacity to carry data at more than 200 kilobits per second (kbps) in one direction – that is, either to receive it (download) or to send it (upload). The FCC used the term “advanced telecommunication capability” to describe services or facilities with the capacity to carry information at more than 200 kbps in both directions. For many years, the FCC received intensive and widespread criticism for these definitions, including from two of the five FCC commissioners. The critics maintained that using such puny data speeds was out of step with current realities and gave the false impression that the United States was more successful in deploying “broadband” and “advanced telecommunications capabilities” than it really has been. Recognizing that these criticisms were valid, the FCC recently issued an order that raised the minimum data speed necessary to qualify as “broadband” to 768 kbps.
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The FCC also adopted a new seven-tier classification scheme, as summarized in the following table:21
| New Speed Tiers |
|
1st Generation Data | 200 kbps to 768 kbps |
|
Basic Broadband Tier 1 | 768 kbps to 1.5 Mbps |
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Broadband Tier 2 | 1.5 Mbps to 3 Mbps |
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Broadband Tier 3 | 3 Mbps to 6 Mbps |
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Broadband Tier 4 | 6 Mbps to 10 Mbps |
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Broadband Tier 5 | 10 Mbps to 25 Mbps |
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Broadband Tier 6 | 25 Mbps to 100 Mbps |
|
Broadband Tier 7 | Greater than 100 Mbps |
| Source: FCC Wireless Competition Bureau |
In considering broadband data speeds, it is important to bear two significant limitations in mind. First, broadband providers often advertise far greater data speeds than they actually deliver. This is an especially significant issue for cable systems. Cable systems generally connect their central operations centers (called headends) by fiber-optic lines to several neighborhood “nodes” and then connect the nodes by coaxial cables to hundreds of homes. Cable systems are designed so that all homes connected to a node must share the total broadband capacity available to that node.
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As a result, at times of high usage, such as early evenings when subscribers come home from work, data speeds will be much slower than at off-peak times. In fact, cable data speeds rarely approach advertised maximum speeds, even at low-usage times. Furthermore, if even a relatively small number of subscribers use BitTorrent or other lawful bandwidth-rich applications, or download videos through YouTube, Hulu, Joost, Stream, or similar services, data speeds for other subscribers can fall below dial-up levels.
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