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The Federal Communications Commission has changed the way it defines “broadband” service. In the past the agency has considered any bandwidth from 200 kbps up to be “broadband.” It now will use a higher 768 kbps definition.

The agency says it will start tracking both downstream and upstream speeds and will abandon the zip code tracking methodology for more census-track level reporting, which should provide greater granularity of the data.

 

Of course, the reason the FCC (News - Alert) defined broadband the way it did was because the global telecom industry has used those definitions. Narrowband is defined as a 64 kbps bitstream. Purists note that any bandwidth above 128 kbps technically has been defined as broadband.

 

In a more refined sense, anything between 128 kbps and T1 has been considered “wideband.” Any bandwidth above 1.544 Mpbs traditionally has been considered “broadband.”

 

All of that is becoming muddled as service providers now talk about “wideband” as representing more bandwidth than a “broadband” connection. All that marketing will muddle things up until the global standards bodies get around to changing the definitions in ways that might make more sense.

 

In a more-accurate sense, “raw” access speed doesn’t mean much, in any case, unless one knows the contention ratios in the network and the number of users contending for that bandwidth at any given point. A network engineered with 200:1 concentration simply isn’t going to perform as well as a network engineered for 10:1 contention.

 

Everybody considers 3G to be a broadband access technology. But many users have experienced real-world throughput that is barely above dial-up speeds (64 kbps to 90 kbps) at times.

 

Increasingly, performance also is bound by the availability of ports at bandwidth at the remote server or peer one is communicating with, as well. Many of us find that our experience no longer is dictated by the formal size of the access pipe but by contention for server ports and bandwidth at the server we are interacting with.

 

The point is that some observers will accuse the FCC of playing politics with the counting. It wasn’t. It was using the definitions the global telecom industry always has used. It’s just that the relevant standards bodies haven’t changed those definitions to reflect what actually is happening in the market.