It’s just one word, but it changes everything. In its latest broadband deployment report, the FCC quietly backpedaled on its mission to expand high-speed internet to every American and eliminated an ambitious gig-speed goal entirely.
“High-speed broadband is often essential to full participation in modern society,” the opening sentence of the Aug. 14 report reads.
That sounds pretty uncontroversial at first glance, but it stands in stark contrast to the previous report issued under President Joe Biden’s FCC, which called access to affordable, reliable broadband “essential to full participation in modern life.” The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres went even further, calling the issue “a matter of life and death” in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“That word ‘often’ — the fifth word in the whole report — just sets the entire tone that suddenly broadband is not as important as it was five years ago,” Christopher Ali, a professor of telecommunications at Penn State University, told CNET.
These FCC reports are mandated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act to evaluate whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are available to “all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.” Today, that’s commonly referred to as the digital divide, or the gulf between people with a modern internet connection and those without. President Donald Trump’s FCC, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, stopped just short of declaring the mission accomplished.
“The digital divide is rapidly closing. And a range of data sets show that speeds are up, prices are down, and competition is intensifying,” Carr said in a statement.
The report says that 96.9% of Americans now have access to speeds of 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload, which the Commission adopted as its standard for broadband in 2024. But those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as they’re self-reported by internet service providers.
“I still think there are ISPs reporting exactly 100/20Mbps speed capability to the FCC while delivering something slower,” Doug Dawson, a longtime expert in broadband and author of the industry blog Pots and Pans, wrote in a post on the report.
Carr voted against the 100/20Mbps standard when it passed two years ago, and he took particular exception with the FCC’s long-term goal of increasing the standard to 1,000/500Mbps, calling it a “Trojan Horse to exclude fixed wireless” that would inevitably lead to “wasteful overbuilding” in his dissenting statement.
That gig-speed goal is now scrapped. In its annual report on the state of broadband deployment, the Commission argued that the long-term goal of 1,000Mbps download and 500Mbps upload speed was unfairly biased against slower technologies like fixed wireless and satellite.
“At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences,” the report says. “The private sector, driven by competition, does not need the Commission to centrally plan technological development.”
Key takeaways:
- The FCC has abandoned its long-term target of bringing gigabit internet to every American, citing a need for “technological neutrality.”
- By reframing broadband as “often essential” rather than “essential,” the FCC is effectively lowering the standard for universal access.
- Critics argue the shift favors satellite providers like Starlink over future-proof fiber, potentially leaving rural communities with slower, inferior connections.
- Critics also argue the new report minimizes affordability as a policy priority, side-stepping the primary reason many Americans remain disconnected.
Why the FCC is lowering the broadband bar
The report paints a rosy picture of the state of broadband in the US, but the reality is more complicated.
“They’re saying that 99.7% of the country has access to broadband if you include satellites. Of course, if you look at who they’re citing for that percentage, it’s Starlink,” says Ali.
Starlink says speeds on its fastest plan reach 320/40Mbps, but in practice, they’re much slower. Data from the speed test site Ookla found that the median Starlink customer 127/21Mbps in the first quarter of 2026. That squeaked by the FCC’s current definition of broadband, but it’s nowhere close to the previous stretch goal of 1,000/500Mbps.
The FCC report states that the gig-speed goal “could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner.” Fiber is the only connection type that can meet that lofty goal today, although many cable companies are getting closer every day through network upgrades.
Anna Gomez, the only Democrat on the commission, said that reasoning ran counter to the FCC’s mission of bringing high-speed connectivity to Americans.
“Lowering standards to ensure certain technologies can meet a benchmark is the opposite of technological neutrality,” Gomez wrote. “Technological neutrality requires that we evaluate all technologies against the same standard and support the ones that perform best.”
She also cited an analysis last year from Penn State University’s X-Lab found that Starlink can support only 6.66 households per square mile before speeds drop below the 100/20Mbps mark. So far, Starlink has pulled off the incredible double feat of increasing its speeds as it adds millions of customers. But it’s done that in part by imposing massive surcharges in areas where it’s at capacity. At my Seattle address, there’s currently a $250 demand fee to get Starlink.
The gig-speed goal wasn’t tied to any specific outcomes, so it won’t change the internet options for Americans overnight. But by abolishing it, rural Americans could get left out of any future funding because they’ll technically already be covered by satellite.
“It really sets a bad precedent for any sort of future-looking deployment,” says Ali. “A lot of communities are going to get stuck with Starlink or Amazon Leo, but then they’re going to find the neighboring communities who got fiber are going to be surpassing them in terms of business opportunities and tax revenues.”
Were gigabit speeds a reasonable goal for the FCC?
In abolishing the gig-speed goal, the FCC report argues that it’s impossible to know whether consumers even want internet plans that fast.
There’s an argument to be made that gig speeds are overkill for most people, and I’ve made it plenty myself. You need only about 25Mbps to stream Netflix in 4K; what could possibly require 40 times that bandwidth?
But that’s starting to change. Data from the analytics company OpenVault found that 22% of fiber subscribers get speeds over 1,000Mbps, and 95% over 200Mbps. Traffic has grown every year since it started publishing data in 2019, and the upstream side in particular “accelerated at its fastest pace ever” in the second quarter this year – a trend OpenVault attributes to accelerated AI use.
If the speed is there, people will use it, says Mark Trudeau, Open Vault’s CEO. As cable ISPs have upgraded their networks over the years, usage has grown hand in hand.
“Every time they did that, you would see an explosion in usage, which just tells you that it’s the speed holding people back,” Trudeau told me.
A task using AI generates 450% more traffic than a human doing the same thing, according to Cisco. An inordinate amount of that traffic happens on the upstream side: 10% of AI flows carry more data upstream than downstream, compared with 0.5% for typical web traffic. AI applications also require latency below 30 milliseconds; Ookla’s data currently has Starlink at 39.
“We keep talking about needing to be competitive with China. And let me tell you that this 2026 report is not competitive with China,” Ali says. “We are not being ambitious anymore. We have just given up.”
No mention of affordability
It’s a truism in broadband circles that the reason most people don’t have an internet subscription is because they can’t afford it, not because they don’t have access.
A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that one in five people who lacked home internet cited affordability as the main reason — the highest of any answer and three times the percentage who said service isn’t available. Another analysis of state broadband plans in 2021 found that all 50 states, plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, identified affordability as the primary barrier to closing the digital divide.
Affordability is mentioned in some form 177 times in the 2024 FCC report; it’s used just 27 times in the 2026 iteration, primarily in references to the 2024 report and in Gomez’s statement.
“The FCC is abdicating responsibility,” Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, told me. “If we don’t talk about affordability, then we don’t have to address it.”
The FCC’s report argues that broadband prices are going down even as the overall cost of living increases. Broadband access advocates disagree. “The record makes clear that broadband providers themselves are concerned with and proactively addressing consumer costs,” the 2026 report says, citing the CTIA, a wireless trade group headed by Ajait Pai, the FCC chair during Trump’s first term.
We’ve found that large ISPs like AT&T, Spectrum and Xfinity all currently offer discounted plans for low-income customers, but there’s no federal mandate that requires them to. States can pass their own legislation to support low-income internet access, but New York is the only one with a law on the books right now. (AT&T pulled its internet plans from New York entirely last year when the state passed the law, then reversed course last month.) The FCC is essentially saying that ISPs are addressing the affordability issue capably on their own.
But the FCC’s claim that broadband prices are actually going down isn’t backed up by the data. An analysis from the Benton Institute found that the average price of home internet grew by 4.8% in inflation-adjusted terms from 2024 to 2025. A 2025 CNET survey also found that 63% of Americans saw their internet prices increase in the previous year.
“The FCC is saying, ‘No, that’s not in our purview. Affordability doesn’t matter,’” Ali says.
The bottom line
An internet connection is often referred to as a “social determinant.” It significantly improves health outcomes for those who have it, increases employment rates in areas with good access and even boosts our psychological well-being. It wasn’t a stretch when the UN called it a matter of life or death in 2020, and it’s still true post-pandemic. While the new report cites legitimately encouraging signs of a narrowing digital divide, it also risks creating a permanent class of internet have-nots.
“It is consistent with this FCC,” Siefer says. “They don’t seem to understand that it’s more than just about what the companies want, but it’s also what is best for the residents of our country.”
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