Simple, Justifiable Bandwidth Goals For America

After yesterday's piece on how defining broadband based on 3Mbps down 1Mbps up is inadequate, I want to share more specific thoughts on the kinds of bandwidth goals American should be setting.

An important first step is to realize that we should have at least two tiers: baseline served and fully served.

Baseline served refers to the lowest level at which we consider a network to be delivering broadband. This is also the level that 100% of Americans (or as close as possible) should have access to.

Fully served refers to the speeds at which we consider a person, building, or area fully served relative to the bandwidth demands of that time.

The second vital step is to acknowledge that we need to have different goals for different types of users, in particular differentiating between residential and what businesses and community anchors need.

Finally, we need goals not just for today but also for tomorrow that are primarily based on the needs of users rather than the limitations of technologies.

Without further adieu, let's take a look at proper goals for residential broadband:

Residential
Today
Baseline - 1Mbps up/down
Fully Served - 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up

2015
Baseline - 10Mbps up/down
Fully Served - 100Mbps down, 20Mbps up

Now let's take a moment to consider why these are the best goals for today:

Today, Baseline @ 1Mbps up/down - The simplest explanation for this is that I think it would be criminal to define broadband in terms of Kbps a decade in to the 21st century. But diving a bit deeper shows that with 1Mbps up/down you can use a lot of the broadband apps available today, like watch video from YouTube or Hulu, do videocalling over Skype, use hosted apps like Google Docs, and, of course, surf the Internet and check email. And from a broadband tech perspective, pretty much everything can deliver this much capacity today, and if it can't yet handle 1Mbps, then we probably shouldn't be taking it very seriously any more.

Today, Fully Served @ 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up - For starters, I wish I could say 10Mbps up/down but I know that's going to get a lot of providers up in arms as their networks can't handle that much upstream bandwidth, largely because of mistakes they made in forecasting future bandwidth demands. But with 2Mbps up I have to admit that you'd have enough bandwidth to use most every broadband app that requires this capacity, though sending very large files will still take a long time. In terms of 10Mbps down, as I laid out yesterday, that amount of bandwidth can handle any of today's generation of apps plus it's enough capacity to support multiple simultaneous users reasonably well. It may not be up to supporting lots of people streaming HD video at the same time, but with a 10Mbps connection you can do pretty much everything else you'd want to on today's Internet.

Now let's consider the goals for 2015:

2015, Baseline @ 10Mbps up/down - If need be we could scale this back to 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up, but my thinking is both that five years from now we'll be using a lot more upstream capacity but also that if there are areas without this much capacity today, that when we're building out to reach them to achieve this baseline goal we sure as heck better not be investing in technologies that don't feature a whole lot more capacity, especially upstream. It would be silly to put more money into last generation technology, so I'm assuming the new technologies that we'll be deploying will feature sufficient upstream capacity to reach these goals. In terms of why to set the baseline at 10Mbps, quite simply I think that we need to get into the mindset that what's fully served today should be tomorrow's baseline. I wish we could say that everyone should get access to the same capabilities, but knowing that that's a challenge that many shirk from and acknowledging that there's a lot that can be done with a 10Mbps up/down connection, I'm trying to make sure that the goals we set are generally considered realistic.

2015, Fully Served @ 100Mbps down, 20Mbps up - Another case where I'll admit that I'm limiting what I think we need in order to be more "realistic" about what we can actually accomplish. I'd much rather say 100Mbps up/down, but I know that calls into question the long-term viability of most technologies other than full fiber networks. And again, I'm willing to acknowledge that 20Mbps upstream is a lot of bandwidth that will enable a lot of things, including being able to upload HD video in real-time. In terms of setting the goal of a 100Mbps Nation, I firmly believe that striving to achieve anything less than that would be a national embarrassment. When so many other countries are setting goals of 100Mbps and beyond, how can we expect to be globally competitive by setting our own goals at anything less? And we can't use our size and relatively low density as an excuse as Australia's set the goal for itself to reach 90% of homes with 100Mbps. Put simply: if we want Americans to have the same opportunities as citizens of other countries, both to compete and participate in the next generation of the digital economy, then we must at least be attempting to level the playing field when it comes to the availability of bandwidth. Plus from a practical standpoint, research like the Need for Speed report from ITIF has shown that the average house of the near future will be using 90Mbps+ of bandwidth, assuming it's available for them to use.

The next set of important goals to set relate to the bandwidth needs of community anchor institutions and businesses, referred to for now as "Commercial" to make things simpler:

Commercial
Today
Baseline - 10Mbps up/down
Fully Served - 100Mbps-1Gbps up/down

2015
Baseline - 100Mbps up/down
Fully Served - 1-10Gbps up/down

The rationale behind these numbers is pretty straightforward. Commercial broadband presumably serves buildings with lots of people sharing the same connection to get online, like a school or office building. Simple math shows that if ten people are using the same connection at the same time that you need 10Mbps just so that each can have baseline access at 1Mbps.

The reason we should set a range in terms of fully served today and tomorrow is that there's a range in the size of buildings and number of potential users that needs to be served. A small business with ten employees has different needs than a school where 1,000 kids have a laptop trying to get online simultaneously. I've made the argument that all schools need fiber-like speeds of 100Mbps and beyond today, and some could already make use of 1Gbps. Additionally any business that wants to host servers on-premise that are open to the public need sufficient bandwidth to support lots of hits to whatever sites or apps they're hosting.

In terms of the goals for 2015, this is a matter of simply bumping the goals up the chain. I'd hope that within five years every business and community anchor institution in this country could have ready, affordable access to 100Mbps. If we can't accomplish this simple goal then I think our national broadband plan has failed. Additionally, if we're not delivering next generation connectivity to those buildings that are considered fully served, how do we expect to be able to enable the next generation of Internet apps?

Assuming we can reach the goal of ubiquitous 100Mbps commercial access, then the technologies supporting those speeds should be able to scale to 1Gbps and beyond relatively easily, or rather, we should only be investing in technologies that can scale in this way, otherwise we're going to be permanently limiting the horizon of our possibilities in optimizing our society around the use of these next-gen networks.

Finally, I think we also should be looking at setting goals for mobile wireless, but acknowledging wireless's many limitations, we should consider setting these goals a tier behind our residential goals, in other words:

Mobile Wireless
Today
Baseline/Fully Served - 1Mbps up/down

2015
Baseline/Fully Served - 10Mbps up/down

Even these lower goals may be overly ambitious, but at least they give us something to work with that insures any wireless deployment is relevant to users' needs and that we're treating wireless as it should be treated in our national broadband plan: as a complementary rather than competitive service to wireline given its limited capacity/reliability.

There's lots more that could be said about setting proper bandwidth goals for America, but in this post we've covered the basics and laid out a simple, straightforward, realistic, and justifiable set of goals that reflect the needs of users while also being internationally relevant.

I'm open to discussions about whether or not we should set the bar higher so that we can be striving to lead rather than follow the rest of the world, but I can not accept setting the bar any lower. I can not feel comfortable with keeping our goals low so as to be more "realistic" when other countries aren't limiting themselves in this way. I can not understand why we'd base our goals more on the current limitations of technologies and trajectories of private sector deployment when what we really need to be looking at are the bandwidth demands of apps and the uses of these networks.

The question shouldn't be, "What can we get?" Instead we must answer the question of, "What do we need?" Then we can determine how to get it.

Quite simply, America can not afford to set mediocre bandwidth goals. We won't be competitive in the global digital economy without a robust enough broadband infrastructure. So our future, our country's future, and our childrens' future depends on setting goals that while achievable are also aspirational, that's based on a realistic analysis of what we need, and that we can then focus our deployment efforts on achieving.