The deployment of broadband services is not moving fast enough, leaving 34 million U.S. residents without access to Internet that meets federal benchmark speeds, the FCC concluded in its 2016 Broadband Progress Report.

According to the report, some 40 percent of people living in rural areas and Tribal lands lack access to broadband services that meet the FCC’s benchmark speeds of 25 mbps for downloads and 3 mbps for uploads. Additionally, 41 percent of schools have not yet met short-term connectivity goals that would allow for the support of digital learning applications, the FCC said.

Despite these findings, the commission also said that deployment figures have improved significantly since last year’s report, which found 55 million residents without adequate service.

The report also uncovered what the commission termed a “persistent” disparity between urban and rural access to benchmark broadband services.

While around 40 percent of the rural population lacked access to sufficient broadband services, only 4 percent of urban residents struggled with the same, the commission said. The numbers, however, were an improvement from last year’s report, which found 53 percent of rural residents lacking benchmark services.

This year’s report also included an evaluation of satellite broadband services, which are subject to the same speed benchmark. The commission found no satellite broadband service met the speed requirement during the reporting period.

In order to accelerate broadband deployment, the FCC said it will provide direct subsidies and help identify and reduce “potential obstacles to deployment, competition, and adoption.”

Though the FCC’s summary of the report seems fairly bleak, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation telecommunications policy analyst Doug Brake said in a Thursday blog post that the commission’s findings rest on “a highly strained reading of the evidence.”

By using the 25 mbps benchmark, Brake said, the FCC is almost deliberately painting a picture of slow progress that will trigger the use of its regulatory authority.

Even assuming the FCC has the best intentions, Brake said the benchmark shows the commission is held hostage by “the ideology of digital elites.”

“By the FCC’s own numbers, we went from having 55 million Americans living in areas unserved by ‘broadband’ in last year’s report to now, in today’s report, 34 million lacking access to 25 Mbps,” Brake wrote. “That’s a narrowing of areas unserved by ‘broadband’ by nearly 40 percent in a single year—if that isn’t timely deployment, I don’t know what is.”