It’s long been a myth that Vice-President Al Gore invented the Internet. Not true, but a fun story to tell at parties (just not parties we attend.) 

What the heck do politics and especially partisan politics have to do with the Internet? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), after years of battling, has voted that Internet Service Providers cannot call their product “Broadband” unless they meet the standard of “at least” 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up.

Why does our Federal Government need to be involved in such a non-governmental issue? Bandwidth has been greatly improving over many years since the old standard for “broadband” of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up.

The problem is, and we’ve written many blogs about this, nobody can regulate bandwidth in many parts of this country or the world. 100 down and 20 up sounds great, but like many other ideologies the government tries to impose on us, it’s just not always practical or even feasible.

The other problem with the government mandating minimum up and down speeds is that ISPs are going to use that directive to say to their customers “sorry, we have to provide you with 100 and 20 so it’s going to cost you.” 

We’ve hammered you with the fact that most ISPs will oversell you bandwidth that you don’t need. We’ve tracked bandwidth utilization, showed you the charts, proven, time and again – like in this blog – that most people are paying for more bandwidth than they need. Now the ISPs are going to tell you “hey take it up with the FCC” when your Internet bills are much higher than they should be.

Let’s get back to the actual practicality of mandating bandwidth speed. There are many places where 100, 20 are just not achievable. We wrote a couple blogs about Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet service:

“Though the price seems steep – $99 a month and $499 for the Starlink kit  – for people here, and all over the world with little or no Internet, it seems like it’s better than nothing. And like most new technologies, those prices will most likely go down over time.”

Think about that: “people here and all over the world with little or no Internet.” Do you think they care if Starlink can’t call their service “broadband” because they are providing 25 down and 3 up? Don’t even get us started on what Starlink is trying to do about latency in their product. Please go through our blog archive and read about the importance of latency over bandwidth for the average consumer – home or business.

Here’s our point. The government doesn’t need to mandate anything when it comes to Internet speeds. They need to concentrate more on Internet content. The technology will dictate what speeds are available.

According to the FCC,Starlink can’t call their service broadband, and apparently neither can T-Mobile:

“For our client, we determined that their best choice for a fast, reliable Internet connection was, wait for it, a 5G cellular service. Our first concern was bandwidth and, of course, latency. We encourage you to read a great blog explaining the importance of low latency.“ Read that story here.

Whatever the service provider in your area calls it; broadband, headband, rubberband, it doesn’t matter. Get the best Internet service available, and don’t pay for more than you need!