Building a Better Internet

At the end of this month, Faculty of Arts and Sciences Information Technology will pull the plug on dial-up Internet, a fitting death knell for an outdated technology. Though around 15 percent of Americans continue to use phone lines and chattering modems to bring e-mail and the World Wide Web into their homes, the era of dial-up is long gone. Its reign as the Internet conduit for the masses was, like most technologies in the Information Age, brief.

It is tempting to wax poetic about how dramatically the Internet has changed since the mid-1990s, when 28.8k was the standard, Web 2.0 marvels like YouTube and Gmail were hardly thought possible, and Facebook was just a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s pre-teen eye. Instead, we should reflect on how far we have to go, since complacent communications companies and outdated technologies still prevail.

The United States may have invented the Internet (although the credit doesn’t go to Al Gore), but our great nation recently ranked 28th in Internet connectivity according to a recent study by the Communications Workers of America. If that wasn’t enough, the study also claimed that the average Internet speed has only increased by about 30 percent in the last two years. This might seem like a big improvement on first glance, but really it’s far from noteworthy in an industry where things tend to double every two years.

The United States does have a significant geographic disadvantage when compared to tiny countries with faster networks, like Sweden or the Netherlands. Stringing high-speed access to rural areas is much easier when your entire country is the size of Illinois. But while a significant access gap exists between urban and rural America, even the fastest regions of the U.S. (the northern Atlantic states) can’t crack the 10 megabits per second mark. South Korea’s average connection speed is over twice that fast.

What are we doing wrong? European countries have been able to achieve faster speeds by forcing telephone companies to rent lines to local Internet service providers for use with broadband DSL. The Federal Communications Commission attempted to do the same during the middle of the decade to allow competition, but it had to back down from this practice after phone companies threatened to sue. Worse, the FCC and the courts allowed SBC to buy both AT&T and Bellsouth in 2005 and 2006, creating a huge monopoly that rivaled AT&T of the 1980s. Lack of competition in the U.S. broadband market has lead to huge profits for companies like Comcast and Verizon, making U.S. Internet not only slow but also among the most expensive in the world.

President Barack Obama has pledged to put broadband in every home through the use of tax credits. His plan stands in contrast to President George W. Bush’s deregulatory approach and harks back to the push to bring electricity and indoor plumbing to rural America in the mid-20th century. The goal is admirable, but may not yield much progress. Top ISPs have responded with a plan to simply redefine FCC’s definition broadband at a lower speed and introduce a three-tiered access system that could force consumers to pay more to receive the same connection speeds. Some providers have made efforts to provide bundled communications, which include telephone, television, and Internet, via fast fiber-optic cables in major cities, but rural Americans are still by and large left behind.

It is no surprise that market-only solutions have failed, because monopolies have little incentive to change, and the benefits of high-speed Internet are somewhat unclear to low-income Americans. The FCC and the courts need to stand up to the established telecommunications companies if they hope to put consumer and business interests first.

Providing widespread Internet access that is both fast and affordable has benefits that extend far beyond creature comforts like downloading movies. A recent report from the World Bank Group found that a 10 percent increase in connection speeds is correlated with a 1.3 percent increase in economic growth. The faster the Internet becomes, the more purposes it can serve; high-speed Internet is the basis for many local IT businesses that generate jobs and exports. Expanding the high-speed Web to rural areas and increasing speeds in developed areas will also make long-distance learning easier and expand the possibilities of telemedicine.

Although the U.S. has demonstrably fallen behind in terms of Internet access, there is still time to catch up. A few years of good policy would create drastic improvement. Further, any claim that the U.S. is losing its edge is nonsense. A huge digital divide still exists between the industrialized countries in the West and East Asia and those of South Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In India, for instance, only around 10 percent of the population has Internet access at all.

As Harvard students, we have even less to worry about. Those using the university’s wireless connection can expect a download rate of around 20 megabits per second when communicating within the country, according to an assessment using speedtest.net. That is, unless you happen to be a FAS affiliate still connecting to the Harvard network using dial-up. In that case, I can only say: Your days are numbered.


Adam R. Gold ’11, a Crimson editorial editor, is a physics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.