The FCC, as is typical, won't release the full text of the changes it adopted for a few weeks, but here's a rundown of major components described at Wednesday's meeting:

• 200Kbps speeds are no longer considered "broadband." Until this point, the FCC has considered any service that produces 200Kbps speeds in the upload or download direction to be "high speed." With Wednesday's vote, that methodology is no more. Now, 768Kbps, which is the entry-level speed offered by major DSL providers like Verizon, will be considered the low end of "basic broadband," a range that extends to under 1.5Mbps.
• Broadband service speeds will have to be reported both for uploads and downloads. Previously the FCC had six big categories of broadband speeds, and they effectively only tracked download speeds. Now the agency says it will require reporting on upload speeds. Pro-regulatory advocacy groups like Free Press say that's a necessary step in part because of particularly in light of Comcast's admitted throttling of peer-to-peer filesharing uploads.
• Upload and download speeds will have to be reported in a more specific way. At the moment, the broadband speeds most commonly offered by cable and telephone companies are lumped into two major categories: those between 200Kbps and 2.5Mbps, and those between 2.5 and 10Mbps. The FCC's new rules would require them to be broken down further, in an attempt to address charges that the current buckets have the potential to overstate the number of high-end subscriptions and understate the number of low-end subscriptions. Those new tiers will be: 1) 200 to 768Kbps ("first generation data"), 2) 768Kbps to 1.5Mbps ("basic broadband"), 3) 1.5-3Mbps, 4) 3-6Mbps, and 5) 6Mbps and above.
• ISPs will be required to report numbers of subscribers, and at the census-block level. Under the current methodology, ISPs report only the number of zip codes in which they have at least one subscriber, and they report numbers of lines nationwide. Now they'll have to report the number of subscribers in each census tract they serve, broken down by speed tier. The FCC decided to use census tracts because researchers may be able to use other demographic statistics collected by the U.S. Census, such as age and income level, to gain insight about what drives broadband penetration rates.
• ISPs will not have to report the prices they charge....yet. Democratic commissioners and liberal consumer advocacy groups had argued such a step is necessary in order to give consumers an idea of the value they're getting for their money--and to compare U.S. prices to those for comparable services abroad. Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps said on Wednesday that he continues to believe it's a "mistake" to omit that requirement, and Adelstein also voiced concern. But a majority of the commissioners opted to push that decision off until another time and gather more comments.

"I'm happy we're starting to change our benchmarks," he said, "but my goodness, how late in the day it is."

said by DV0407 :

Well i guess the 256 tiers offered by Satellite isnt broadband anymore LMAO!!

said by nasadude :

as soon as we have accurate numbers on broadband speeds and deployment in this country, the charade will be over.

said by TKJunkMail :

Also what hasn't changed is that the tiers are still based on download speeds.

Meaning 768/128 would be considered in the broadband tier.

said by nokiatech :

Most "DSL Lite" packages are 768. I think that's what most would call minimum broadband speed. It's a night and day diffrence faster then dialup.