FCC proposes higher speed goals (100/20 Mbps) for USF providers

Wed Jun 1 20:55:05 UTC 2022

>> Saying most people don't need more than 25 Mbps is like saying 640k is
 >> enough for anybody.

The challenge is any definition of capacity (speed) requirements is only a point-in-time gauge of sufficiency given the mix of apps popular at the time & any such point-in-time gauge will look silly in retrospect. ;-) If I were a policy-maker in this space I would "inflation-adjust" the speeds for the future. In order to adapt to recent changes in user behavior and applications, I'd do that on a trailing 2-year basis (not too short nor too long a timeframe) and update the future-need forecast annually. And CAGR could be derived from a sample across multiple networks or countries. In practice, that would mean looking at the CAGR for the last 2 years for US and DS and then projecting that growth rate into future years. So if you say 35% CAGR for both US and DS and project out the commonplace need/usage then 100 Mbps / 10 Mbps becomes as follows below. If some new apps emerge that start driving something like US at a higher CAGR then future years automatically get adjusted on an annual basis.

Of course 100/10 is an arbitrary benchmark for illustrative purposes, as is the suggested 35% CAGR. I suspect that in the case of US, the Internet will see much more significant growth in US demand and that new applications will emerge to take advantage of that & further drive demand growth (similarly for low latency networking).

Jason

DS
2022    100
2023    135
2024    182
2025    246
2026    332
2027    448
2028    605
2029    817
2030    1,103
2031    1,489
2032    2,011

US
2022    10
2023    14
2024    18
2025    25
2026    33
2027    45
2028    61
2029    82
2030    110
2031    149
2032    201

/eom