These six are smart man. Real smart. They went to college and have degrees and they know how much internet an average household needs. It ain’t the 25Mpbs Tom Wheeler, Chairman of the FCC, announced. That’s too fast! Too much speed.
“We are concerned that this arbitrary 25/3 Mbps benchmark fails to accurately capture what most Americans consider broadband,” they said in their letter.
Well yes. Less than 1 in 4 Americans—24.3 percent to be exact—have access to speeds higher than 15Mbps. Bully for them, but that means that more than 75 percent of the population hasn’t even come close to experiencing broadband speeds. Of course they’re not going to define 25Mbps as broadband. That’s like expecting a peasant in Elizabethan England to define clean as “not wreaking of excrement and general filth.”
In their letter, sent to Tom Wheeler and the FCC on January 21, 2016, the senators note that “we are aware of few applications that require download speeds of 25 Mbps.”
“Netflix, for examples, recommends a download speed of 5 Mbps to receive high-definition streaming video, and Amazon recommends a speed of 3.5 Mbps.” This is very true. They do recommend those speeds. For one stream. In one home. If three different people live in a home and watch three different shows? That’s 15Mbps and 10.5Mbps needed respectively.
If those same people want to enjoy entertainment on their new 4K TV—because that is almost exclusively the kind of television currently available for purchase. They will need...25Mbps for a single stream.
But hey, these Senators are just looking out for you. They know what’s best because they can find the lowest speed requirement on the Netflix site.
These Senators are incredibly short-sighted and it’s clear that they haven’t done any research or read any periodicals or spoken to any experts beyond the lobbyists begging them to write this letter in the first place. Their letter suggests that they operate in a vacuum where Netflix isn’t nearly 40-percent of all internet traffic and 4K televisions aren’t rapidly increasing their marketshare and their own constituents aren’t clamoring for better access to the internet.
Particularly egregious is that these senators are all from relatively rural states where the internet, when available, is slow and expensive and competition between ISPs is virtually non-existent. There are 3 millions residents of Mississippi and only 34-percent of those residents have internet speeds of 10Mbps or higher. But sure senators, the real problem is Tom Wheeler trying to hold the ISPs to some kind of reasonable standards.
Read the senators’ entire letter below. Bonus points if you can see where they just copy and pasted sentences from ISP lobbyists.
