Faster Home Broadband Should Be Enshrined in Law

The way we use the internet has changed—and fast. Before the pandemic, telecoms and internet service provider BT was handling five terabits of data every second from its UK customers during the day. When the pandemic hit and the world locked down, data volumes doubled. In Germany, DE-CIX Frankfurt, a major connection point for the global internet, broke multiple bandwidth records with 2020 peak volumes beating 2019 rates by 28 percent. Data volumes have grown far slower than data speed. That’s not just bad news for your Zoom calls, it’s also bad for the economy. It’s for that reason that the US Government Accountability Office called for the FCC to revisit its minimum broadband speed requirements in July 2021. It follows a bipartisan group of senators who wrote to the FCC in March 2021 to increase the minimum standard to 100Mbits/second. “The pandemic has reinforced the importance of high-speed broadband and underscored the cost of the persistent digital divide in our country,” the senators wrote, pointing to issues with seniors accessing telemedicine and children learning online. “They will tell you that many networks fail to come close to ‘high-speed’ in the year 2021.”