Don’t short broadband today
By Gary Bolton / Fiber Broadband Association
How much broadband does the typical U.S. household need? Two decades ago, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set the minimal broadband benchmark at 4 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds. By 2015, the agency updated it to a whopping 25/3 Mbps.
While it is in vogue to consider a least-cost solution as the only answer for unconnected and under-connected households, it hasn’t worked out well in practice over the past 20 years. During that time, numerous communities with copper-based DSL solutions were left behind as new internet applications drove the need for increased speed over a decade of progress. It took a pandemic, combined with state and federal actions, for the FCC to raise the broadband bar in 2024 to 100/20 Mbps, with an aspirational goal of 1 Gbps/500 Mbps sometime in the future.
While 100/20 is an improvement, setting an arbitrary “good enough” benchmark and expecting it to last for the next decade or longer isn’t the same as meeting broadband needs in actual households today. More people under the roof, more bandwidth required. Households can have four or more family members, with two or more children, and multigenerational living arrangements are commonplace across the country; yet, somehow, they’re supposed to make do. During the pandemic, we found that families of four or more were struggling with 25/3, as both parents had to work remotely while their children attended school simultaneously.
New application demands
The need for more bandwidth is also driven by the continual march of new and improved applications introduced every year. We are all familiar with the requirements for remote work, which include cloud services and multi-person video conferencing. Services will continue to become more sophisticated, especially with the ongoing introduction and integration of AI into commonplace work tasks. Throw in gradual improvements in video and sound quality over the next five years, and it’s easy to see how accepting 100/20 as a near-term goal is a case of kicking the can down the road, rather than simply doing it right today.
Talk to any professional photographer, and they will tell you that high-speed uploading is a necessity for their profession. Most now utilize AI tools to save time on basic tasks, such as culling, cropping, and other edits, to provide the best images for their customers. The Imagen AI photo processing website takes 10 minutes to process 1,500 photos, dramatically improving the productivity of photographers by automating rote tasks, freeing them up for more creative work.
On the Western Slope of Colorado, Delta-Montrose Electric Association (DMEA) provides multi-gigabit services to its customers. Part of “Call of Duty” is being produced by software programmers in Paonia using DMEA’s 6 Gbps fiber service. Other businesses utilizing fiber in the area include Snow Capped Cider, Storm King Distilling Company, an e-bike manufacturer, and Ross Reels, a manufacturer of fly-fishing reels.
Less bandwidth upstream and downstream means waiting, which means a loss of productivity. RVA Market Research and Consulting examined the relationship between higher bandwidth and greater efficiency in its “Gigabit Fiber Can add $326 billion to U.S. GDP” report last year. The paper conservatively estimated that about 11% of interactive time on a 100/20 Mbps connection was spent waiting for things to upload and download, adding up to a productivity loss of almost 20 minutes a day across three hours of interactive work, with the overhead for moving around files and working with cloud services. Boost the connection to a gigabit connection, and the person would be waiting only around 2 minutes a day, adding up to about 108 more hours of work per year. Heavy interactive users, such as remote workers, would gain almost 32 more productive workdays annually.
Multi-gig service emerges
Current broadband market trends underline that 100/20 Mbps may already be as outdated as 25/3 Mbps is for many households.
While people obsess over the least cost as being the only driving factor, China is deploying 50G PON across their networks, a fact that goes unmentioned by many concerned about that country’s continued desire to surpass the U.S. on the world stage.
Every primary fiber carrier in the United States, as well as most of the smaller ones, is offering multi-gig service plans, with households opting for the 5 Gbps and 8 Gbps services.
GFiber, leveraging Nokia’s latest PON technology, is rolling out symmetrical 20 Gbps service in select markets and testing 50 Gbps speeds, while some leading-edge carriers are starting to roll out 50 GPON on their networks.
Scaling IoT
Another trend that continues to drive the need for more bandwidth is the steady increase of IoT in the home. Research from Parks Associates indicates that the average U.S. household has 17 connected devices, while 23% of households have at least one connected appliance. For multi-tenant unit owners and operators surveyed in April 2025, 72% plan to upgrade their smart building solutions on at least one of their properties in the next 12 months.
Improvements in home security systems that will drive more upstream bandwidth include higher-resolution cameras, more cameras to cover all aspects of the home on the outside, and mobile devices to investigate problems within the home if the owners aren’t there. Soon, a glass break, window sensor, or smoke alarm alert can trigger a walking or flying robot to investigate an incident, confirm, and detail the problem while first responders are en route.
A mobile robot will also be a part of an in-home ageing safety system, investigating the health and well-being of a resident who can’t be reached by phone and hasn’t otherwise been heard from. AARP’s AgeTech collaborative is one effort to build the technologies for the next generation of in-home care, which requires high-speed, low-latency broadband to deliver health tech services of all types.
AgeTech is big business, with the U.S.’s 50+ demographic expected to spend over $120 billion on technology by 2030. Anywhere from 40 to 60 new AgeTech startups are sourced each year through AARP’s accelerator programs to improve quality of life, deliver more effective point-of-care health services within the home, and combat social isolation that comes from the decline of physical mobility.
One of the tools in the AgeTech toolbox is virtual reality (VR), providing a way for friends and family to gather together and interact far beyond the limits of a flat-screen video call. VR is the “killer app” for broadband, requiring both high speed and very low latency to be effectively implemented. But VR is far more than an AgeTech tool, with applications in gaming, fitness, and numerous engineering and other business applications.
Equally valuable for business is augmented reality (AR), providing in-the-moment access to technical manuals for reference, repairs, and training, as well as “over the shoulder” review and documentation of maintenance and repairs of equipment. For example, Penn State has been developing an AR remote veterinary service, enabling veterinarians to examine animals remotely without the risk of spreading communicable diseases to the farm.
Precision agriculture is one area where there will be tremendous bandwidth growth. Farming has always been a data-driven business, but today’s technologies, including IoT, satellite imagery, AI, and autonomous vehicles, have led to an explosion in monitoring, data collection, analysis, and modeling, resulting in more productive farms that generate healthy profits for their owners.
Consider the life of a PrecisionAg farmer. Instead of walking the fields, he pulls up the overnight readings from his field sensors and the latest high-resolution satellite imagery, using it in conjunction with historical and machine learning data to figure out which parts of the field need water, fertilizer, and other inputs by using a cloud-based AI model with a digital twin of his field. With a few keystrokes, he prepares the tasking for his fleet of autonomous tractors to apply the necessary resources exactly where they are required. The farm machinery uploads its video imagery to the cloud, further documenting crop health and the work done, along with telematics information used to generate predictive maintenance reports. This ensures maximum uptime and optimal equipment utilization.
Fiber is also the connective bridge between the high-speed cellular networks needed to remotely operate farm equipment and the cloud services that are the heart of autonomous vehicles, delivering for today’s 5G multi-gig speeds and easily capable of providing for the needs of 6G and beyond when it ultimately arrives. As autonomous vehicles transition from farms to highways, fiber is already in place and ready to support the broadband needs of these systems when they enter the mainstream.
Going short on broadband by spending the least amount of money per location rather than installing fiber upfront only ensures that more money will have to be paid in the future when those households need more than what the least expensive solution provides.
Least cost should not be confused with a synonym for the best cost solution that lasts for decades and is future proof for the broadband needs yet to come.
Gary Bolton is the President & CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association.