In its annual report on broadband deployment, adopted on August 14, the Federal Communications Commission removed the long-term speed goal it set two years ago. The order states that as part of a "return to following the plain language of Section 706," the agency would "abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report".

The benchmark that defines broadband for regulatory purposes is unchanged at 100 megabits per second down and 20 up. What has gone is the separate, higher figure the commission had been aiming at over the longer term.

The reasoning

Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to report to Congress on whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. The commission's position is that this statutory task does not call for a long-term aspiration at all, and that setting one distorts the analysis.

The order argues that a long-term goal is "not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner," and that fixing on gigabit speeds may be "unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds," risking skewing the market by "potentially picking technological winners and losers." The commission also noted that long-term technological development and consumer preferences cannot be predicted. The report was adopted under chairman Brendan Carr.

There is a real argument here, and it is not simply a lowering of ambition. A goal expressed as a single symmetric speed does implicitly favor fiber, because fiber is the technology that most readily delivers it. If the statutory question is whether people can get service, a target only one delivery method can hit will shape which methods get counted as adequate and which get funded.

The objection

Commissioner Anna Gomez concurred in the report rather than dissenting, while disagreeing with how it was constructed. Her objection was less about the gigabit figure than about what the analysis leaves out: omitting affordability and usability "was a policy decision with which I disagree," she said, adding that the deployment requirement Congress wrote is a floor rather than a ceiling.

She also questioned how availability is being counted. Gomez took issue with the claim that 99.7 percent of Americans can reach 100/20 service via satellite, noting that fewer than half of satellite users actually achieved those speeds in 2025, and said she worked with the chairman's office and the Wireline Competition Bureau to add caveats about usability to the report itself.

That gap between availability and delivered performance is the substance of the disagreement. A household counted as served by a technology that in practice delivers less than the benchmark is, on paper, covered.

What actually changes

Not much, immediately, and it is worth being precise about that. A goal is not a rule. No provider is required to offer any particular speed because of it, and none is forbidden from deploying gigabit service now that it is gone. Comcast and AT&T will not change their price lists on Monday.

The effects are slower and run through two channels. The first is measurement: the report is how the FCC tells Congress whether deployment is adequate, and the standard it measures against determines whether the answer is yes. This year the answer was yes. The second is money. Federal subsidy programs lean on the commission's definitions of adequate service, and a framework built to be neutral between fiber, fixed wireless and satellite makes it easier for the latter two to qualify for public funds.

Whether that is sound policy depends on a judgment about the future. If the applications people will use in fifteen years fit comfortably inside 100/20, the commission's technology-neutral position is the sensible one and gigabit targets were an expensive preference for one industry. If they do not, subsidizing infrastructure to a benchmark set in the mid-2020s will look like paying twice.

The commission has come down, for now, on the first view.