FCC: 44% of Net Connections Meet Broadband Speed Goal

New report follows up July findings

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/2/2010 5:23:36 PM

According to the FCC's just-released report on Internet access service, only 44% of fixed connections have advertised speeds that approximate the national broadband plan's deployment target of 4 megabits per second downstream and 1 Mbps upstream (it used 3 Mbps/768 kbps as the benchmark).

The report follows the 706 report on broadband in July that concluded broadband was not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely manner.

In both reports the FCC is basing its findings on new and different data and new ways to look at it.

Steve Rosenberg, chief data officer of the Wireline Competition Bureau, pointed out in a blog on the biannual report that it had been rechristened the Internet Access Report rather than the High-Speed Service Report to reflect the reports' migration from an old FCC definition of "high-speed" as anything over 200 kilobits per second.

Rosenberg pointed out that the 706 report found that 90% of homes have access to networks capable of delivering 4/1 speeds.

The report found that subscriptions to mobile plans with full Internet access had increased by 40% in the first six months of 2009 (the data was as of June 2009), which Rosenberg said "underscores how critical it is to free-up more spectrum to support these popular, innovation-driving services, as called for in the National Broadband Plan."

The FCC is trying to reclaim/free up another 500 Mhz of spectrum from broadcasters, other commercial providers and government to auction for wireless broadband.

Other report findings include that, for the first six months of 2009, Cable modem connections were up by 3% to 41 million; DSL was up 1% to 31 million, and fiber made the biggest percentage jump in fixed-location service, up 23% to 4 million. Satellite was up 6% to 1 million.