Ars Technica reports that the FCC asked the public how and if the term “broadband” (as in internet connection) should be defined, after it had proposed that “basic broadband” as simply 768kbps to 1.5Mbps (as in connection speed). They also seemed to think that this should be based on the actual speed that providers have, as opposed to what they claim in advertisements.
Sadly, the providers had a few issues with this. Mainly, they’d like to define what is broadband based on nominal speeds, not the actual speeds they provide. They argue that it is complicated to determine actual speed (never mind that there are countless sites to assess your current connections speed when a provided wants to sell you a different service). Even worse, they don’t want to have the definition tied to any applications (that is; video, torrents, gaming, VOIP, etc.). That way, if they decide to conveniently turn off a service on their pipeline, they can still call it broadband.
So what if you can’t actually do anything with it? It’s still fast! Well, in theory, anyway.
