The Story of Blockcast: A Journey to Connect the World (Part 1)
The Early Years
I grew up in the shadow of the telecommunications industry. In fact, I’m a third-generation telecom. My grandfather worked for Telecom Egypt, and my uncle was a telecom professor in Saudi Arabia where my parents emigrated, and I was born. My uncle moved to teach in Oman in the mid-90s and gifted us his IBM, so my family was one of the first in my community to have a computer.
We were also very fortunate that Aramco, where my dad worked, gave us free internet access so before long, I developed a knack for computers. My pursuit of knowledge on the internet offered was insatiable. Even before I could read, I was comfortable booting up DOS on one floppy, and my games on another. Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled firewall arbitrarily blocked content, including American shows like South Park, that I really wanted to watch. To get around the firewall, I wrote my first proxy…in the sixth grade. I didn’t have a bank account to buy hosting for it, so in exchange for a freelance job, I convinced the founder of Ubiquity Hosting to run it for my friends and me.
Upon arriving at boarding school in New Hampshire, I was awash in new challenges, not least of which was a strict 10pm internet curfew for students (but, of course, not for the faculty). I booted Kali Linux, and with the help of Aircrack-ng, I was back online. At the same time, I was freelancing. I launched a couple of SaaS businesses including hotmailforwarder, an email forwarding proxy. I was doing pretty well as a high schooler and one of the only people with a smartphone in my dorm. During a massive winter storm that took out our power for days, I set up a hotspot that people from across campus came to use.
These early experiences set the stage for my future pursuits; it’s probably not hard to realize that I was already settling on a life path for myself: computer networks and engineering.
The Call to Adventure
My uncle had seen my deep interest in telecom from the seed he had unknowingly planted and fostered it. I fondly remember lots of conversations with him. He would spend hours telling me about his work, like when he was helping define the spec for 4G with the transition towards IP-native core networks, and what the future held with software-defined radios so cellular towers would fit in the palm of our hand, or with 5G we’d have direct mobile-to-mobile connectivity.
I went for my undergrad at my dream school, UC Berkeley, right after the Egyptian revolution. I felt an immense sense of gratitude for the opportunities that stemmed from having access to the internet, and a sense of responsibility to build infrastructure and foster others with the same access. During my sophomore year, I met a postdoc, Kashif, on a hike. He told me about his research on a community-run, shoebox-sized, solar-powered cell tower designed for remote regions where traditional operators couldn’t operate profitably. The conversation brought me back to my uncle’s teachings. The whole lab was devoted to researching technology and infrastructure for emerging regions, and I felt a calling to get involved.
Determined to join the lab, I sought out the professor leading this project. After completing the required courses, I was admitted to the Honors Program with a research mandate. This opportunity allowed me to work on research projects like an SMS-to-Instant Messaging proxy for Internet.org, further fueling my interest in telecom infrastructure for underserved regions. The success of this project and others around the same time propelled me to continue working with the group while pursuing my Master’s degree.
Facebook Acquisition and Our First Major Deployment in Congo
When the postdocs eventually commercialized the technology, I was the first hire. We had a few deployments, including one community in the Papuan rainforest operated by a local school. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a path to scale with our heavy focus on emerging markets, and the speed of telecom operators. Also, the use of licensed spectrum before the FCC’s greenlighting of Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) meant we were technically pirates and that investors wanted nothing to do with.
Facebook, with its initiatives to expand connectivity, saw the potential of the work we were doing and acquired us to be part of Facebook Connectivity Lab to iterate on what we built from a GSM to a 4G solution. Later we open-sourced it as Magma (it became the backbone of Helium 5G) and OpenCellular for the Telecom Infra Project. One of our first sites was in Idjwi, a Congolese Island in Lake Kivu where half a million people lived without network coverage. We leveraged a 4Mbps internet link at a school set up by a non-profit, La Difference, which they brought in wirelessly from Rwanda over the lake. Our split core architecture allowed us to route voice calls and SMS locally without using the backhaul, but data services remained a challenge. The backhaul was too small for that many people to access online video, and it was economically unviable to scale it up at $2000/Mbps/month. It was a stark reminder of the digital divide and the need for innovative solutions to bridge it.
The Road to CDNs
The communities we served wanted access to streaming services like YouTube and Netflix, not just basic internet. This realization led me to explore CDN technologies, aiming to keep data traffic local. Working alongside Facebook’s traffic team, I gained valuable insights into CDN operations. This helped jumpstart my understanding and allowed us to focus, at least initially, on a single problem: using a CDN for Facebook in this new network, but it didn’t ultimately make sense as the cache-hit ratio for social media and the portion of traffic of Facebook app traffic on the networks was too low. Running CDNs from other networks was not an option because of the exclusivity of the industry. The only thing we could set up was Wikipedia for the school, but it wasn’t interesting at all to the people of this island. They also wanted streaming video like the rest of the world. It made me realize that this whole exercise was an initiative so much bigger than just Facebook.
The Revelation
During my time working on the satellite communications team at Facebook, it dawned on me all the capacity being launched into space was barely enough to address the exploding demand from inflight and cruise ship networks, the largest consumer of satellite internet, and that prices were unlikely to come down any time soon for community networks. Airlines were also facing thesame problem that we experienced on Idjwi: too much load for streaming video and not enough capacity. In fact, many airlines blocked video streaming altogether to keep inflight WiFi from becoming unusable. So, I thought, what if video streaming over satellite internet, could be shared like broadcast television, and with the help of a cache, passengers flying over remote communities paying for internet could share their data stream with folks on the ground wanting exactly the same thing? I also caught chatter of a new standard being developed by ATSC, the standards body for broadcast and television systems, and efforts to assist internet video streaming with television broadcast capacity, and my fascination with multicast — where one data stream can be shared by multiple people instead of how it works now where everyone gets their own copy of the stream — grew overnight. It would change the economics of the internet, making video streaming a public good that was non-rivalrous.
I knew it would be difficult to get modern streaming services and CDNs onboard and to work together with the 100-year-old broadcast industry. I decided to take a leap of faith. Leveraging some early investment gains in Ethereum (thanks to Lisa), I left my job at Facebook and built an initial prototype.
And Blockcast was born.
