Ajit Pai says Internet download speeds of 3Mbps are still good enough for you

Former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai left the building, but not without giving the telecommunications industry a final pat on the back: in its final broadband annual report, it decided that the 3 Mbps download speeds and 25 Mbps upload speeds were even higher. than sufficient for Americans (via Ars Technica).

“We find that the current benchmark speed of 25/3 Mbps remains an appropriate measure to assess whether a fixed service provides advanced telecommunications capabilities,” the report reads.

How to come? Because the FCC believes that is all the law requires: “We conclude that fixed services with speeds of 25/3 Mbps continue to meet the statutory definition of advanced telecommunications capabilities; that is, these services allow[] users to create and receive high quality voice, data, graphics and video telecommunications. ”

I don’t know what you consider to be “high quality”, but I know from experience that my 5Mbps upload speed, for which I pay $ 100 per month, does not allow my family to “create” lots of videos. or streaming play.

Those 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps speeds aren’t even minimums, by the way, as the annual broadband report isn’t something that needs to be enforced. It’s a benchmark by which the FCC determines whether it is doing its job to help bridge the digital divide – where as many as one in 3 American households have no access to high-speed internet at all.. Currently if a single ISP claims it can provide a single 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up internet connection anywhere in your entire census block, let alone your home, the FCC considers its job done. Oh, and the FCC doesn’t even audit those numbers! It is a kind of “fox guarding the henhouse”.

Some of the shortcomings in the reporting are being fixed, but the ridiculous speeds and prices the United States is paying are not.

As for Pai, who tops our list of the 84 biggest tech failures of the decade, he is now free to find lucrative employment as a lobbyist for the telecommunications industry. Former President Donald Trump gave his entire administration explicit permission to do so, killing a five-year ban on officials from pressuring their old agencies, on exiting.