Is Universal Broadband Service Impossible?

Broadband Internet service is widely expected to be the fundamental universal service for the 21st century. For this reason, numerous national and international efforts to close the “digital divide” between broadband haves and have-nots have been funded and pursued over the past decade. This suggests that reaching global universality will be a very difficult task. This paper argues that the strong guarantees made by the current broadband paradigm-low latency and constant availability-are unnecessary obstacles to its adoption as an affordable and universal digital service. We show that there is nonetheless a plausible strategy for deploying a “Basic Broadband” service that does not require such guarantees and is able to offer, at reasonable cost, almost all the critical and valuable services and applications currently delivered over low latency broadband, synchronous telepresence excepted.