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The other weekend I was pulling apart and reconfiguring some old PCs.  I pulled out a 56K modem from one PC and it made me stop and think about how long it’s been since I used one.  I was first able to use broadband around 2001.  Broadband infrastructure has come a long way in the last decade.  Gone are the days of listening to that loud modem dialup sound and tying up the home phone line for hours at a time (for that matter who even needs a landline anymore?).  We’ve gone from downloading content at painfully slow speeds to being able to stream entire movies on demand.  It’s now possible to get an internet connection almost anywhere too whether your 37,000 feet up in the air or on your cell phone on a rural stretch of highway.

Remember these?

Despite great progress in the broadband area, there are many opportunities for improvement in areas like speed, coverage and affordability.  The National Broadband Plan is an internet roadmap that will try to address the following six goals (quoted from the site).

1. At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.
2. The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.
3. Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.
4. Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 Gbps broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals and government buildings.
5. To ensure the safety of Americans, every first responder should have access to a nationwide public safety wireless network.
6. To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

I’m glad that the U.S. government is thinking about long term internet infrastructure needs and is trying to plan for it now.  There are many challenges and it will require collaboration with private telecommunications companies.  Existing infrastructure needs to be replaced with fiber, rural areas need to move past 56K connectivity and wireless networks need to expand coverage and support a rapidly growing number of users.  There is a great conversation around the plan at Fred Wilson’s AVC.com and another conversation there about the parallels of broadband infrastructure to the development of the NYC subway system.

While the government works on developing its plan, Google has decided to do an experiment of its own.  Their plan is to build fiber broadband networks in a small number of cities across the U.S.  Google plans to deliver 1 gigabit per second fiber connections to homes, which is about 100 times faster than most broadband connections today.

It’s an exciting experiment and it’s great to see a private company putting up its own capital to push the broadband envelope.  Google received an overwhelming response from communities across the country that want to be part of the experiment.  Communities quickly mobilized grassroots campaigns to vie for Google’s attention.  Topeka, Kansas renamed itself to Google, Greenville, SC made a people-powered LED Google sign and Duluth, MN and Superior, WI collaborated on a joint campaign.  Google won’t be able to build in all of them, but it clearly shows that cities everywhere are passionate and eager for better broadband.