Over the last few years, I have become somewhat of a politician, when it comes to speaking about the Internet and the undeniable bandwidth problem we have in the US. The difficulty I ran into multiple times was that it is hard to convince people that not having enough bandwidth is a problem at all. Bandwidth is something that most people just don’t think about. It is like breathing, you never realize you need air, until you are deprived of it. It has only been within the last couple of years that people are starting to wake up to the limitations of low performing internet connections. This has been brought on by consumer usage of more internet connected devices, from the smart phone to the iPad. As these devices tap into more and more of the wireless capacity of home routers and cell phone towers, they begin to push the limitations of the land line technology that usually provides the internet connection. This includes T-1 lines, DSL modems, ethernet, and fiber technologies.

The problem then becomes two-fold. We have a capacity issue for individual consumers wanting to communicate and for our institutions and businesses that want to provide better services. With low performing internet, we end up with schools that can’t use technology to teach our children, businesses that can’t provide the type of services that we want to buy, and innovative healthcare solutions that we can’t adopt. My concern is not being able to watch YouTube without the buffering message, it is instead the elderly person who could receive in-home diagnostic care without having to go to the hospital if only broadband was available.

Last year I spoke to a large audience of educators and mentioned the bandwidth issue. They were able to understand the issue personally because many of them use Netflix at home and have had to deal with streaming problems. Between video streaming and gaming, I think everyone is waking up to the problem. However solutions still seem to be unattainable at this point. Regardless of who do you think is to blame for the lack of affordable broadband solutions, the truth is that we as citizens need to deem this issue important enough to do something about it.

It is disappointing to me that technology wise no one has stepped up and come up with an affordable solution to this issue. Looking back in the past, many companies used proxy servers to provide internet to their offices. The open source Squid Proxy is a good solution for caching internet connections. There seems to be a lack of initiative to create a cheap router with a built-in caching squid proxy. Performance wise, you do need memory and disk space to run squid smoothly, but by far I think the biggest deterrent is the complicated problems that proxies create. With a proxy you do have to deal with some sites not working correctly, and UPnP network devices tend to break.

We are kind of left in this limbo state of having limited internet connections and no real viable solutions. The longer we ignore the problem the longer we stall innovation and deny ourselves improvements in education, business, healthcare, and entertainment.