“This new unlicensed spectrum will be a powerful platform for innovation as we’ve seen time and time again when we unleash American ingenuity, great things happen,” he said.

“Therefore actual download speeds experienced by U.S. consumers appear to lag advertised speeds by roughly 50 percent.”

Buried within the recent Broadband Deployment Report was the announcement that the Federal Communications Commission will publish a separate report comparing broadband services in the United States to the rest of the world.

The FCC said that it found that up to 24 million Americans don’t have broadband Internet access under the new standard.

Four economists argued in a letter to the FCC sent Wednesday that the question before the agency was “not whether to impose network neutrality, but whether to eliminate it.”

The report comes to the conclusion that if the United States does not increase its broadband availability it will fall behind economically and that the states are each trying to solve the problem of availability in unique ways.

Access to broadband Internet is no longer a luxury but a necessity, and rural areas need more of it, Sen. Claire McCaskill and others said Friday.