The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not “technologically neutral,” suggesting that it isn’t fair to other, slower technologies.
In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal “as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment.”
Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC’s latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.
“As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report,” the order said. “A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.”
The FCC said that comments submitted by cable industry group NCTA and wireless industry group CTIA “support our reasoning for abolishing the long-term goal.”
Gigabit goal “prejudicial” to satellite and wireless
The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.” But in last week’s report, it said it is not eliminating the goal merely to help providers of slower technology.
“We disagree with commenters arguing that our concern about technological neutrality merely serves to accommodate technologies that may currently offer slower speeds,” the FCC said. “At present, we do not know the nature of future consumer preferences and, considering that the goal is not required by the statute and does not serve any positive purpose (as discussed herein), we believe it prudent to abolish it.”
Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was not convinced.
“Lowering standards to ensure certain technologies can meet a benchmark is the opposite of technological neutrality,” Gomez said. “Technological neutrality requires that we evaluate all technologies against the same standard and support the ones that perform best. We need not lower the standards or get rid of them entirely to allow certain technologies to flourish despite their shortfalls.”
The change does not affect grant programs that require ISPs to deploy certain speeds in exchange for government funding. Most of the network deployments paid for by the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund are required to have gigabit speeds.
“If this is the standard that funding awardees are held to, other providers should be working towards providing service at the same speeds,” Gomez said.
FCC finds deployment is good enough
Section 706 requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed “on a reasonable and timely basis” to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market.”
Democratic-led commissions have generally found that the industry isn’t doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. The Carr FCC maintained that tradition in the latest report.
“Today, we conclude our annual inquiry by finding that deployment of advanced telecommunications capability to all Americans meets the statutory standard of being reasonable and timely,” the FCC report said.
The FCC said that as of mid-2025, “approximately 94 percent of Americans had access to fixed wireline service at our speed benchmark of 100/20 Mbps,” and that the percentage was 97 percent when including fixed wireless service. Including satellite service would bump it to 99.7 percent, the FCC said.
Many Americans had only one choice for modern wireline service. In addition to the 5.7 percent of US households without any 100/20 Mbps providers, 40.6 percent of households had just one wired broadband provider offering those speeds. When including fixed wireless service, 3 percent of households had zero options and 20 percent had just one option.
No price analysis
In addition to availability, the Biden-era FCC’s 2024 report considered the price of broadband. The Trump-era FCC called that a mistake, saying that “the 2024 Report strayed from the statute’s plain language, which requires consideration of ‘availability’—not adoption, affordability, or equitable access.”
While the Carr FCC chose not to measure affordability itself, it concluded that “evidence shows broadband prices are going down.” The FCC report cited evidence from third parties including a price analysis and comments written by broadband industry lobby groups, but didn’t cite advocacy group research suggesting that prices have risen.
“Today’s Section 706 Report shows that President Trump’s policies and the Commission’s Build America agenda are delivering real results for the American people,” Carr said. “More Americans than ever have access to affordable, next-gen services. The digital divide is rapidly closing. And a range of data sets show that speeds are up, prices are down, and competition is intensifying.”
Gomez objected to the decision to drop affordability from the analysis. “The report at hand covers only infrastructure deployment and consequently does not address other important pieces of the puzzle, affordability and usability, which tie directly into the purpose of broadband deployment: ensuring that everyone is connected. Omitting affordability and usability from the analysis was a policy decision with which I disagree,” Gomez said.
She also called the 99.7 percent deployment figure misleading, because satellite “is limited by physical obstructions to the line of sight, capacity constraints in areas with high demand, and network congestion that can result in slower speeds.” As Gomez noted, Starlink satellite broadband suffers from congestion that varies by region, and Starlink has imposed “demand surcharges” of up to $1,500 in areas with many users.
