A replay of this conversation is available here.

Our expert panel discussed the technical details and policy ramifications of defining broadband. Here are a few highlights from this informative panel.

“Who does the measuring? …  It’s the people. Do you have what you need to get your health care, to get your education, to do your job?”

Mei Lin Fung, People-Centered Internet

Vint: What is broadband and how do we know if we have it?

Christophe: My experience has been with Internet measurement. Measurement is a difficult task. It’s not only a matter of speed – you want to measure service. Can you access a service with decent quality and how can you compare providers? Today the speed test just gives you the bandwidth but whether you do the measurement from a tablet, phone, or laptop makes a difference. Whether you use Wi-Fi, internet connectivity, or cellular it makes a difference. The location of the provider’s servers and the time of day also make a difference. 

People want measurements against services and to understand what they can do and what services they can access. If we want to measure the Internet to understand what real service and customer experience people have to a fair comparison between the different service providers, then we need to standardize the technique. We need to define precisely how to measure in a way that cannot be tricked by anyone and that can be compared.  

Vint: Thinking of those communities that have real economic challenges. What kinds of targets as a provider of Internet service are you setting yourself for the cost of service and are they achievable? 

Matthew: The money that’s coming through the federal government today, though it’s not enough to solve the problem, is enough to lay a strong foundation in Indian Country. We are seeing tribes pulling away from what we call the Tribal Digital Village Network to stand alone independently and potentially build out their fiber to the home because there is funding for individual tribes to be able to do this.

So we’re in a bit of a quandary. We have a broadband speed that we’re trying to hit that’s defined by the Federal Communications Commission. We have new broadband speeds that are being projected that are four times greater than what was previously required. We have densification in some of the reservation neighborhoods that don’t allow us to do that wirelessly anymore because of the lack of available spectrum to distribute that connection with that level of throughput. 

We are trying network redesign, some refocus, and figuring out how to distribute our network with fiber closer to the home. But the end user in a non-economically advantaged tribe is a mix of people who have a career, people who work minimum wage, and people who are on subsistence. We are fighting a battle to keep our pricing affordable because we know that service is so valuable for them to get a better job, to get further educated, and to get employed if they’re not employed. But at the same time how do you sustain a model of its magnitude?

I have to give credit to the Southern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association where they have not forced the network to make back all of its losses. They have allowed several of us to participate in multiple job duties throughout the corporation and not draw the most expensive salaries and requirements from the network itself so that it may sustain under its weight. I think that’s very forward-thinking in the Tribal Chairmen’s vision of this project and it allows us to do as much as we can for those that are on a limited income.

Vint: The topic of this conversation started as how do we define broadband? Maybe what we should be trying to do is to figure out what it is that people need for a particular application. Can we supply it to them and, if not, can we give them any recommendations about how to adjust the system to achieve what they need, even if it doesn’t necessarily require super-high speeds?

Mei Lin: Who does the measuring? I was asked this question at the Global AI Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. They asked, “Is it an NGO? Is it philanthropy? Is it the government?” They said the answer is clear. It’s the people. Do you have what you need to get your health care, get your education, to do the job?

We have conversational AI to get these answers from the people themselves. We don’t have to have someone else’s interpretation of it. Of course, they need to have access to a phone to answer. It is a biased survey in that if you don’t have a phone, your voice is not heard. But a lot of people have phones. So we should measure by asking people can you get the job done, can you get your health care, and can you get your education?