The moving target: The amount of bandwidth required to make people happy increases each year as the benefits of broadband increase. What looked like a good technical solution a few years ago may not look like one today. That means any true solution must be future proof. Providers in the United States have made great strides toward modernizing their network infrastructure, and they continue to do so. But truly solving the bandwidth problem will require a national commitment to ensuring a world-class infrastructure.
So writes Masha Zager, editor in chief of Broadband Communities magazine in her column appearing in the the January-February 2018 issue. Zager's column is titled The Bandwidth Problem. The origins of that problem stem from a massive policy failure dating back to the early 1990s. Public and regulatory policy regarded advanced digital telecommunications as a luxury add on to legacy telephone and cable TV services.
That perspective badly hobbled the necessary modernization of America's metallic cable infrastructure designed for 20th century analog telephone and cable TV service to fiber optic to the premise infrastructure for advanced digital telecommunications in the 21st -- the world class infrastructure referred to by Zager. It also established a mindset of bandwidth poverty instead of bandwidth abundance.
Consequently, a generation later the nation is limping along, trapped in a continuous, frustrating cycle of infrastructure failing to keep up with burgeoning bandwidth demand and the embarrassment of Americans still forced to use dialup and satellite services. Also absent is the national commitment that Zager calls for to address the problem. That commitment should be to solve it once and for all with a declaration of a war on bandwidth poverty and an aggressive national initiative to fast track construction of a fully fibered telecommunications network reaching every American doorstep.
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