What is broadband?

This spring, the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service gave Pegasus Rural Broadband, a subsidiary of Pegasus Communications Inc., a $13 million loan to provide high-speed wireless Internet access to 100 rural Texas communities with a total population of 400,000. For purposes of its Rural Broadband Access Loan program, Rural Utilities Service officials define broadband — with the caveat that the definition can change — as follows:

At the beginning of each fiscal year, agency officials publish a notice in the Federal Register defining the minimum data transmission rate to qualify as broadband service during that funding period.

To qualify as broadband service in fiscal 2004, the minimum data transmission rate is a 200 kilobits/sec connection to the network, both from the provider to the customer (downstream) and from the customer to the provider (upstream).

Source: Federal Register