What is Internet Insufficiency?
We’ve all had those moments. You’re in the car, on the subway, or on a plane and your internet connection mysteriously cuts out on you when you need it most. The outages could be due to spotty cell phone service, falling out of range from a WiFi access point, or a host of other reasons. Disappointment and frustration ensue.
For millions of fortunate people in developed countries and cities, this common inconvenience results in waiting umpteen minutes to see if our critical communication took place. Was our Slack/WhatsApp/SMS messages received? Our social media memes posted? Podcast dowloaded? Email sent? How long will I have to wait??
Here in New York City, where pre-pandemic subway ridership peaked at approximately 5.5 Million riders per weekday, this anxiety fluctuation is still a daily recurrence. It is compounded now by a persistent fear of trying to maintain social distance on less frequent but still crowded trains. Despite the MTA’s best efforts to improve connectivity on the subways, the powers that be have decided in the past five years to only provide connections in select train stations but not on the trains themselves. This coverage leaves a glaring hole in the connectivity question for the 90%+ of the time you spend commuting next to other impatient city dwellers.
There’s more.
Once your connection is established, have you ever noticed how quickly your OS, apps and browser take the liberty to hijack your anxieties with alerts and advertisements from big-budget marketers? These packets of info are prioritized ahead of the useful content you’re hoping to exchange, even when you have possible bandwidth limitations. This is no accident, and you’re not in control of the barrage. Browse social media apps and news web sites, and the content displayed is likely to be immediately targeted at your psyche by a small set of powerful companies with superhuman AI engines and data pipelines. This tragedy is chronicled very well in the Social Dilemma, which I consider a must-watch for anyone looking to understand the undue impact of social media on society’s beleaguered mental wellness.
This two-headed problem — spotty connectivity meets intrusive ad targeting — I’m dubbing Internet Insufficiency. The expansion of 5G (and eventually 6G) promises to close some coverage gaps in select areas, but signal interruptions will always remain a challenge of any telecommunications system. Faster speeds and improved bandwidth might just serve to exacerbate the current model ensuring that AI-promoted ad content is king.
There are also technical arguments against the inefficiencies of centrally hosting the world’s content from AWS/Google cloud datacenters and CDNs, but I won’t cover that here. If you’re interested in the future of distributed content hosting, watch this amazing talk by one of the founders of InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) Juan Benet.
This challenge is global in nature and affects billions of people every day. In rural areas and less developed countries and cities, access to efficient messaging is not merely a matter of missing out on the latest social media gossip. It can be a matter of life and death, especially in unsafe environments and natural disasters.
So with global ambitions and intimate knowledge of local infrastructure problems, I decided in 2019 to embark on the next phase of my professional career putting a team together to develop a novel content platform SubWiFi.
At SubWiFi, our aim is to end internet sufficiency globally, and we’re starting with the known problems in the New York subway system. The core technology is inspired by the fact that our broadband infrastructure is not set up to take full advantage of the presence of people and smartphones to curate and spread information directly to one another. In the absence of sufficient internet infrastructure, the people are the network!
I’m excited to continue our team’s journey to change the way people exchange information in public spaces.
We’d love to hear from you! Reach out to me at mike@subwifi.com to join our mailing list and learn more about our latest experiments on the New York subways.
