What is Broadband?

According to the FCC (Wiki source) it would seem to require >4Mbps downstream and >1Mbps upstream...

OK, so the States can go their own sweet way and a different definition is used in the UK, but I wonder what proportion of US users qualify, let alone UK ones!

Broadband is the use of multiple frequencies for data transmission, as opposed to the modulation of a single frequency. Fibre is baseband, DSL is broadband.

If you read the reference, that figure is only used for a very specific purpose and with a lot of provisos. It's certainly a good figure to aim at.

But even I manage those figures and I'm a long way from my exchange.

One part of me thinks it's good to encourage such a minimum (4M/1M), and sounds typical of US consumerism.

Another part of me just wonders if the yanks have to be bigger at everything.

Yours is a technical definition so it is objective but not especially useful.

The one originally posted is a functional definition so subjective and you'll get almost as many definitions as there are definers. None can be classed as either right or wrong. Unless used to define an advertising claim or something similar it is a pretty pointless definition though.

Yours is a technical definition so it is objective but not especially useful.

It is very useful.

If people are defining "high speed internet access" they would be better off calling it that, for example VDSL is being used in the US to provide TV and the broadband bandwidth is bigger than the internet access bandwidth.