In a recent interview, Micah Beck, associate professor of computer science, discussed universal broadband service on a podcast called The Hedge, which is hosted on the website rule11.tech. In the interview, Beck explored two questions:
- What would the Internet have to look like—or what kinds of services would need to be developed and deployed—to make broadband-class service available to every user? and
- What could this kind of development do to drive entire societies forward?
Beck has co-authored a paper on the topic entitled “Is Universal Broadband Service Impossible?” with Terry Moore, associate director of the UT’s Innovative Computing Laboratory. In it, they argue that the requirement of low latency in the delivery of data, which is part of the standard definition of broadband service, is an unnecessary impediment to the universal delivery of many critical and valuable applications. A form of broadband that does not guarantee low latency or high availability can be more easily made universal, and could support all critical applications other than teleconferencing, remote gaming, and others that inherently require those characteristics.
Beck and Moore will present their paper this week at the IEEE 19th International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Smart Systems 2022 in Denver, Colorado.