The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) quadrupled the minimum speed benchmark for fixed-broadband services being offered to the U.S. population and instituted one for 5G-based wireless services, which could impact ongoing government efforts to bolster high-speed broadband coverage. The FCC also found current broadband deployments are not meeting these requirements for many underserved communities.

The FCC is now “defining advanced telecommunications capability for fixed broadband” as services providing download speeds of at least 100 Mb/s and upload speeds of at least 20 Mb/s. These standards are four-times higher than the previous 25 Mb/s download and 3 Mb/s upload speed the FCC had been using.

Wireless service providers have also for the first time been presented with a service benchmark that calls for minimum download speeds of at least 35 Mb/s and upload speeds of at least 3 Mb/s.

Dan Hays, partner at consulting firm PwC, explained that the FCC move is the government agency “playing a bit of catch up with where the industry and even the state-level standards have gone over the last five or six years.”

Hays noted that from statistics his firm has seen, “more than 90% of the U.S. population already has access to those kinds of speeds, so this is really trying to bring the edges of the broadband economy up toward the center.”

The FCC’s decision also reiterated previous work toward increasing these “long-term” minimum requirements to 1 Gb/s for download and 500 Mb/s for upload. That goal could take some time.

Network speed test monitoring firm Ookla reported that the nation’s largest fixed-broadband providers handily meet the most recent speed goals, but remain woefully behind that 1-gig target.

Ookla conducted speed tests during the fourth quarter of last year, which found all of those providers tested showed download speeds in excess of the new goals and nearly all matching the new upload speed standard.

Those test results showed Cox Communications provided the highest median download speed among operators tested at just over 261 Mb/s. Verizon provided the slowest median download speed of those providers tested, but its 202 Mb/s result was still more than double the new FCC standard.

Median upload speeds varied greatly between operators, with AT&T posting a median speed of more than 195 Mb/s – or nearly 10-times the new FCC minimum upload standards – while Spectrum’s 15.6 Mb/s median upload speed result was the only to come in under the new standard.

While not held to the same standard, Ookla found 5G-based fixed-wireless access (FWA) services from Verizon and T-Mobile US provided median download speeds of around 122 Mb/s. However, there was a big gap between the approximately 150 Mb/s download FWA speeds provided in urban areas and the between 51 Mb/s (Verizon) and 92 Mb/s of FWA download speeds for rural areas.

Ookla’s testing also showed traditional 5G-based cellular services are well ahead of the FCC’s new standards. T-Mobile US was by far the fastest operator, with median download speeds of nearly 189 Mb/s, which was more than double the approximately 90 Mb/s speeds witnessed by Verizon and AT&T. All three carriers were also comfortably ahead of the FCC’s upload speed standard, with median speeds ranging from 12 Mb/s for T-Mobile US down to 8 Mb/s for AT&T.

The FCC found fixed-broadband services meeting its new goals were not available to 7% of the U.S. population. That coverage gap was significantly higher for rural and Tribal lands, with approximately 28% of people living in rural areas and 23% of people living on Tribal lands not having access to those broadband speeds.

Those numbers are in general slightly worse for the new 5G-based broadband standards. The FCC noted 9% of all Americans don’t have access to 5G-based services hitting the new standard mark, including nearly 36% in rural areas and 20% of people living on Tribal lands.

Combined, the FCC found 45 million people do not have access to both options.

“Based on our evaluation of the data, we find that our universal service goals … have not been met, and we therefore conclude that advanced telecommunications capability is not being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion,” the FCC report notes.

The government is attempting to bridge this gap through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) $43 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, which was itself part of the federal government’s $65 billion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). The BEAD funds are targeted at expanding broadband networks to unserved and underserved areas and to provide ongoing financial support to increase access.

However, those funds are only now starting to make their way to states that were the quickest to get their funding paperwork filed.

Hays noted that the FCC decision to increase minimum speed standards “may start to weed out the very bottom of broadband speeds.” These would include those operators still relying on DSL or 4G LTE-based FWA services.