The word “broadband” is often used in marketing materials, but its actual definition has been malleable over the years. Now, though, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a new report to indicate what should be considered “broadband.”
The new standard designates 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload speeds, up from the last time they were defined in 2015. At that point, the FTC decreed 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload speeds. That’s how far we’ve come.
You might be wondering where these numbers came from, and according to the FTC, they are “based on the standard now used in multiple federal and state programs,” as well as “consumer usage patterns” and “what is actually available.”
According to Speedtest.net, the average download speed in the U.S. is 256 Mbps, which is eight times faster than it was a decade earlier. In case you’re wondering, that puts the country at 12th in the world for internet speed. As Toms Hardware points out, streaming movies on Netflix requires 15 Mbps or higher for 4K content, while Nvidia GeForce Now needs 35 Mbps for 1080p game streaming.
Yet, the FTC’s report concluded that a survey taken in December 2022 found some deficiencies in how the country is currently doing with fast internet accessibility.
“The report concludes that advanced telecommunications capability is not being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion based on the total number of Americans, Americans in rural areas, and people living on Tribal lands who lack access to such capability, and the fact that these gaps in deployment are not closing rapidly enough.”
More than that, the report indicates that it has a long-term goal for “broadband,” eventually arriving at 1 Gbps download and 500 Mbps upload speeds. It didn’t provide a timeline for this goal, but based on the last time a report on broadband was given, it may be many years before another update is provided.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).
Two residents of Chicago have filed a lawsuit in the US over claims that robots run by Coco Robotics and Serve Robotics captured their facial and hand measurements without consent, bringing renewed attention to the food delivery robots. The cases raise a troubling question: If a robot delivers food to your door, can it also be gathering sensitive information about you?
According to a report by The Associated Press, the proposed class-action lawsuits were filed in Cook County on Oct. 9 and allege violations of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act. The complaints claim that the robots’ cameras and LiDAR sensors captured information on customers’ faces and hands as they approached the machines to pick up their orders. Both have denied the allegations.