National broadband plan

Broadband is a term normally considered to be synonymous with a high-speed connection to the internet. Suitability for certain applications, or technically a certain quality of service, is often assumed. For instance, low round trip delay (or "latency" in milliseconds) would normally be assumed to be well under 150ms and suitable for Voice over IP, online gaming, financial trading especially arbitrage, virtual private networks and other latency-sensitive applications. This would rule out satellite Internet as inherently high-latency. In some applications, utility-grade reliability (measured for example in seconds per 30 years outage time as in the PSTN network) or security (say AES-128 as required for smart grid applications in the US) are often also assumed or defined as requirements. There is no single definition of broadband and official plans may refer to any or none of these criteria.