U.S. Broadband Policy's North Star: Fiber Is the Key to Closing the Digital Divide

Fiber-Rich Farming: Broadband Requirements for Precision Ag Today and Tomorrow, published by the Fiber Broadband Association’s (FBA) Precision Agriculture Working Group in May 2026, argues that Precision Agriculture (Precision Ag) has crossed from a productivity option into an operational necessity for American farms — and that the federal broadband benchmarks designed to fund rural connectivity are dangerously out of step with what modern farming actually requires. The NTIA’s BEAD program currently defines “underserved” as locations lacking access to at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. Proposed Farm Bill provisions set eligibility thresholds as low as 50/25 Mbps. The FBA contends that both thresholds risk classifying agricultural communities as “served” while leaving farms without the connectivity required to operate data-driven, AI-integrated precision farming systems. A symmetrical baseline of at least 100/100 Mbps better reflects operational demands today, and that standard will need to rise further as technology advances.

Precision Ag encompasses GPS/GNSS-based auto-steer and route optimization, variable rate technologies (VRT) for seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation, in-ground sensors and livestock monitors, yield monitors, and telematics systems transmitting data between equipment, devices, and cloud platforms. John Deere — which introduced its first automated tractor in 2022 and is now equipping all farm equipment with the option to operate without a human driver — requires constant connectivity to function. Lane Arthur, John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group Vice President of Precision Technologies, told Fiber Forward Magazine that connectivity loss causes the tractor to stop: “High levels of connectivity are critical for us to do what we do.” The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that 27% of U.S. farms or ranches already use Precision Ag practices, with cost, complexity, interoperability, and data access cited as the primary adoption barriers — not interest or intent.

The whitepaper documents a critical shift in traffic patterns that current federal benchmarks fail to account for: unlike traditional consumer broadband, Precision Ag is upload-intensive. Farms generate data at the edge — from drone imagery, machine and field logs, sensor streams, weather stations, livestock wearables, bin and yard monitoring systems, and remote support video. DJI’s enterprise-grade Matrice series drones have a maximum video bitrate of up to 60 Mbps (H.264), and imagery resolution, frequency, and operational time-sensitivity are all trending upward. Land O’Lakes Chief Technology Officer Teddy Bekele, speaking at a Fiber Connect event hosted by the FBA, stated plainly: “The limiting factor has always been broadband. We need fiber.” Land O’Lakes operates 115 research plots across the country to model farming outcomes, with the entire data pipeline — from field collection to cloud analysis to farmer recommendations — dependent on reliable upstream broadband.

The FBA evaluates four access technologies against Precision Ag requirements. Fiber is the only technology that cleanly meets the long-term profile for symmetric high-capacity upstream, low and predictable latency, reliability under load, and future scalability via electronics upgrades without rebuilding the physical medium. Cable broadband using DOCSIS 4.0 — which CableLabs states supports up to 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream over Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial (HFC) — can narrow the performance gap in markets where modernized plant exists, but that modernization has not reached most rural coaxial infrastructure. Fixed wireless access (FWA) and private LTE/5G networks offer the fastest deployment timelines and are effective for on-farm mobility, but consistency of uplink and latency under shared load, combined with weather, foliage, and distance challenges, make the most resilient design “wireless-at-the-edge, fiber-in-the-core.” Satellite — including Low Earth Orbit (LEO) systems like Starlink — remains a critical stopgap for remote areas, but an Ookla report found the 2025 U.S. median for Starlink was 117.74 Mbps down and just 16.91 Mbps up, and Geostationary Orbit (GEO) satellite latency of 500–600 milliseconds disqualifies it from real-time agricultural applications at scale.

The FBA concludes with a direct policy recommendation: federal and state broadband programs must evolve past minimum speed thresholds and adopt symmetrical standards that reflect the realities of data-driven farming. Investing in scalable fiber infrastructure is the only way to ensure that rural America and the nation’s food supply remain competitive in a rapidly evolving agricultural economy.

Read the White Paper

Whitepaper FAQ’s

1. What is Precision Agriculture and why does it require high-performance broadband? Precision Agriculture (Precision Ag) uses data, connected equipment, automation, and analytics to make site-specific farming decisions — applying the right seed, fertilizer, water, or pesticide at the right place and time. Core systems include GPS/GNSS-based auto-steer, variable rate technologies (VRT), in-ground sensors, livestock monitors, yield monitors, and telematics platforms. These systems continuously generate and transmit data between field equipment, farm management software, and cloud platforms, requiring low-latency, high-upstream, highly reliable broadband connections to function without interruption.

2. Why does Precision Agriculture need upload capacity, not just download speed? Traditional consumer broadband benchmarks overweight download speed. Precision Ag inverts that model: farms generate data at the edge and must continuously upload it to cloud systems for analysis and decision support. Sources of upstream demand include drone imagery, machine and field logs, sensor streams, weather station data, livestock wearable telemetry, bin and yard monitoring, and remote support video calls. DJI’s enterprise-grade Matrice series drones have a maximum video bitrate of up to 60 Mbps (H.264), and imagery resolution and upload frequency are both trending upward as Precision Ag matures.

3. Why are current federal broadband benchmarks inadequate for Precision Agriculture? The NTIA’s BEAD program defines “underserved” locations as those lacking access to at least 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. Proposed Farm Bill provisions set eligibility thresholds as low as 50/25 Mbps. The FBA argues that both thresholds fail to reflect the upstream requirements of data-driven agriculture — Precision Ag systems require robust upstream capacity well above 20–25 Mbps. If programs continue to define “served” at these levels, large portions of rural America may be misclassified as connected, reducing federal funding eligibility and disincentivizing investment in scalable infrastructure even as farming demands grow.

4. What broadband speed threshold does the FBA recommend for Precision Agriculture? The FBA’s Precision Agriculture Working Group recommends a symmetrical baseline of at least 100/100 Mbps as an appropriate minimum threshold for farm operations today, and notes that this standard will need to rise as AI integration, automation, and edge computing architectures become more prevalent in agricultural operations. Symmetrical or near-symmetrical capacity is necessary to support field-to-cloud data transmission, real-time analytics, and multi-device farm environments that current asymmetric standards do not adequately serve.

5. How does John Deere’s experience illustrate the broadband dependency of modern farming? John Deere introduced its first automated tractor in 2022 and is now equipping all farm equipment with the option to operate without a human driver. Lane Arthur, John Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group Vice President of Precision Technologies, explained in Fiber Forward Magazine that the planting unit uses sensors to geospatially record every seed planted, creating a real-time geospatial map — and that losing connectivity causes the tractor to stop entirely. According to Arthur, “High levels of connectivity are critical for us to do what we do.” This illustrates that connectivity is not supplemental to automated farming operations — it is a hard operational dependency.

6. What does Land O’Lakes’ experience show about the relationship between fiber and farm productivity? Land O’Lakes has operated 115 research plots across the country for over a decade, collecting data on seed variety performance across different soil types and environments to build models that help member farmers make better decisions. Chief Technology Officer Teddy Bekele stated at a Fiber Connect event hosted by the FBA that broadband has always been the limiting factor in that process: “The process begins with data collection at the farm level, which requires reliable broadband.” Land O’Lakes’ position — that internet connectivity is essential for farmers to access data-driven recommendations — reflects a broader industry reality that Precision Ag’s value chain depends end-to-end on upstream broadband performance.

7. How does fiber broadband compare to fixed wireless access for Precision Agriculture? Fixed wireless access (FWA) and private LTE/5G networks are often the fastest-to-deploy option for rural locations and are well-suited to on-farm mobility applications. However, consistent uplink performance and latency under shared load are harder to guarantee with fixed wireless, and capacity is shared across users. Weather, foliage, and long distances create additional reliability challenges. The FBA concludes that the most resilient rural network design for Precision Ag is “wireless-at-the-edge, fiber-in-the-core” — using fiber as the primary backhaul foundation that enables reliable wireless connectivity at the farm level.

8. How does satellite broadband perform for Precision Agriculture applications? Satellite broadband — including Low Earth Orbit (LEO) systems like Starlink — is a critical stopgap for remote areas where fiber is not yet available. However, an Ookla report found the 2025 U.S. median for Starlink was 117.74 Mbps download and just 16.91 Mbps upload. Geostationary Orbit (GEO) satellite latency of roughly 500–600 milliseconds disqualifies it from real-time precision agriculture applications. LEO performance varies, and upstream limitations are detrimental to the farm-generated data volumes that modern Precision Ag systems produce. The FBA concludes satellite is not optimal for data-intensive, AI-enabled Precision Ag at scale.

9. How does DOCSIS 4.0 cable broadband compare to fiber for Precision Agriculture? CableLabs states that DOCSIS 4.0 supports up to 10 Gbps downstream and up to 6 Gbps upstream over Hybrid Fiber-Coaxial (HFC) infrastructure, enabling multi-gigabit symmetric services. Where modernized DOCSIS 4.0 plant exists, cable can narrow the performance gap with fiber. However, that modernization has not reached most existing rural coaxial infrastructure, and cable performance remains sensitive to shared-medium congestion and node design. The FBA concludes that fiber still leads on scalability headroom, latency consistency, and rural extensibility — where cable plant rarely reaches.

10. What does the GAO report on Precision Agriculture adoption find? The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, Precision Agriculture: Benefits and Challenges for Technology Adoption and Use (January 2024), found that 27% of U.S. farms or ranches already use Precision Ag practices. The GAO documents barriers to broader adoption including cost, complexity, interoperability, and data access challenges. The FBA notes that Precision Ag adoption accelerates when farmers can reliably connect machines, sync files, upload sensor streams, and use cloud decision tools without friction — pointing directly to broadband quality and upstream capacity as the enabling variable.

11. What future network demands will Precision Agriculture place on rural broadband? As AI integration and automation deepen in agriculture, the FBA and Grand Farm — an organization dedicated to accelerating agricultural innovation — identify growing network requirements including higher upstream throughput for moving raw and processed data to AI models, lower-latency access for interactive recommendations and autonomous control systems, greater reliability for automation that cannot pause for connectivity interruptions, edge computing architectures combining local processing with cloud synchronization, scalability for increasing device counts and higher data rates, and stronger security for critical operational data against ransomware and supply chain threats.

12. What is Grand Farm and what role does it play in the fiber-agriculture connection? Grand Farm is an organization dedicated to accelerating innovation in agriculture through technology. Dr. William Aderholdt, Grand Farm’s Executive Director and Co-founder, stated on the FBA’s Fiber for Breakfast podcast that reliable connectivity is a prerequisite for designing the next generation of agricultural tools: “You can’t design new tools if you don’t believe connectivity is going to be there. Forward-thinking investment in broadband infrastructure at the last mile has set the foundation for U.S. agriculture to reap the benefits of this technology.” Grand Farm identifies pest management and animal health as current top challenge areas where technology and connectivity play a central role.