By Shane Tews
As the
pandemic has shifted work, education, and entertainment online, there is a
growing appetite in Washington to enhance broadband access across the country.
However, some members of Congress and the current administration have advocated
for ramping up broadband speeds to a symmetrical 100 megabits per second (Mbps)
both downstream and upstream (known as 100/100). Where is the push for this new
standard coming from, and what would it mean for the average consumer?
Richard Bennett, founder of High Tech Forum and a co-creator of Wi-Fi, returned to the podcast to explain how mandating 100/100 would burden consumers and fail to connect more Americans to the internet. He and I also discussed President Biden’s infrastructure plan and why “future-proof” networks seldom live up to their name.
Below is an edited and abridged transcript of our talk. You can listen to this and other episodes of “Explain to Shane” on AEI.org and subscribe via your preferred listening platform. You can also read the full transcript of our discussion here. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in.
Shane Tews: Richard, the current standard
for high-speed broadband in the United States is 25 Mbps for downloads and 3
Mbps for uploads (25/3). Given how well the American internet has performed
during the pandemic, it seems the current standard has served us well. Why do
we now “need” 100/100?
Richard
Bennett: I think setting a symmetrical parameter for broadband speeds is kind
of outcome-driven. If what we want is a justification for pulling fiber optic cable all over the US, then we have to come up
with a requirement based on one of the unique properties fiber optic cable has.
Hypothetically, 100/100 should enable a whole
lot of applications people want that require equal uploads and downloads. But
it turns out fiber optic cable is not the only way to achieve that; you can do it
with wireless too. You can actually get symmetrical behavior out of the cable
network. You can get symmetrical behavior out of the telephone. It’s always
been an option, but we have chosen to allocate more bandwidth on the downstream
side than on the upstream side because there’s more traffic to move. This is
what matches consumer demand.
So if I have a one-gigabit symmetrical
connection, that means I have two gigabits of bandwidth to work with. With the
same amount allocated to upstream as downstream, it’s pretty likely upstream is
going to be idle 95 percent of the time. So I think we’ve just backed into a
corner that the advocates of recabling the nation with fiber optic cable have
stumbled into by trying to justify an outcome that was predetermined.
It seems like 100/100 being pushed as the “new
normal” is actually providing cover for another goal here. Also, 100/100 would make a lot of people
with fast, working internet connections unable to say they have high-speed broadband.
Wouldn’t this essentially increase speeds for those who are already connected
at the expense of those who still aren’t’?
Yeah, and it makes the case for massive
government intervention to essentially rewire the country with fiber — a
technology that only the government can pay for at this point. It knocks pretty
much all the private actors out of business, and for what?
Sure, a lot
of people are frustrated with their internet service providers (ISPs), but
there is going to be an ISP in the picture regardless of who’s providing the
service. And if they’re constrained by government decisions about where to pull
cables and who gets it first, we’re locking ourselves into another 10-plus year
debacle over speeds while many Americans continue lacking internet access
altogether.
This brings us back to the idea that
certain technologies or networks can be “future-proof.” But what if we had
future-proofed using what was in vogue 10 years ago?
Yeah, I
think fundamentally, bits don’t really care what kind of medium they’re moving
over. It can be co-ax, it can be wireless, it can be Starlink, it can be 5G. When
did the wire become the most important factor in this overall system? The whole
point of the internet is that internet protocol doesn’t really care what the
communications medium is.
There are
also some fingerprints of players in Washington who have been advocating for a
nationalized broadband network for about 20 years, and have been wanting this
sort of thing for a long time. As to the rhetoric about future-proof networks:
They were saying that same thing in the 1990s. The symmetrical high-speed fiber
optic network was a 1990s vision of a future-proof network. And of course, the
irony is that in the 20 years that have elapsed, we’ve seen the rise of mobile
broadband.
The one
thing that the future-proof vision of future-proofed wires can’t provide for
you is mobility. And it turns out that mobility is more important to us. The
mobility and the convenience of wireless connections is more important to
people than having some arbitrarily high-capacity upload channel that you’re
never going to use. The thing that really matters most in both broadband
policy, I think, and also in the personal experience of the internet is: You
want the connectivity to be pervasive. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing,
we want the option of connecting to the internet and using that to enhance the
experience — whatever it is.
We want
networking to be a seamless part of everyday life. The network has to adapt to
us; we don’t have to adapt to the network anymore. We don’t have to sit at a
desk, looking at a screen while stuck in one location if we don’t want to.
It seems
like we’ve fallen out of touch with the goal of getting more people connected —
and are now focused instead on speed.
Yes, but I
should also note that in some respects, I think the advocates for a new
high-speed broadband standard are somewhat correct. 3 Mbps upstream has always
seemed a bit constrained to me. But I think, probably, the correction that
needs to be made to the standard is something like 25/5, 25/6, or 25/8 — maybe
even 25/10 — but not anything beyond that. To me, this 100/100 push really
seems to be more of petty Washington, DC politics than a sober assessment of
what people’s actual needs are and where the policy should go.
Like I said,
we need networks that are more flexible, pervasive, adaptable, and software-controlled.
We never realized back when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) started
making these standards that there’s really no way to create a definition of
broadband that works in all cases. Now, I think the answer to that question is:
You need a software-defined network that can adapt dynamically to the needs of
whatever applications you’re running. If you’re the kind of person who wants to
do a complete offsite backup of your hard drive every once in a while, you
should be able to get the upstream capacity to do that quickly when you need it
— but not have to continually pay for it when you don’t.
What we
actually need to get out of our network is flexibility across the range of
applications we use, and if it can give us that at a low price by allocating
bandwidth dynamically between people who aren’t using their connection and
people who are at any given time, that’s great. But how do you square that kind
of network dynamism and efficiency with notions like net neutrality and that your
network has to meet some predefined standard that the FCC basically pulled out
of thin air?
It’s this whole adversarial relationship between regulators and service providers. This is really, I think, probably the most toxic thing I’ve seen in broadband policy in the few years I’ve been involved in it. And so really, we need to see this more as a partnership.
The post The heavy cost of symmetrical broadband speeds: Highlights from my conversation with Richard Bennett appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.