Breaching the Broadband Divide With Offline-First Capability
Broadband, or high speed internet, seems as essential to life since Covid-19 as oxygen: it’s how we work, interact with friends and families, educate our children, and receive medical care. For many, however, high-speed internet is either unavailable or unaffordable. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 20–24 million Americans don’t have broadband. That number, however, is far higher according to a recent study by Microsoft, which estimates that 162 million people don’t have speeds that the FCC defines as “broadband.” The FCC defines broadband as 23Mbps. (The fastest internet speed available in America is 2000Mbps while the average is 133Mbps.)
This discrepancy, if correct — and according to Gigi Sohn, Special Counsel to the FCC under the Obama Administration, it is — is staggering: it means that 49% of the US population has very slow internet or none at all. The reason for this discrepancy is likely due to the fact that the FCC says if you can serve one person in a “census block” that means you are serving everyone in a census block. Census blocks are mapped regions that the government uses for measuring population; a census block can be one city block or hundreds of square miles in rural areas. If there are 5,000 people in a census block and just one person has broadband internet, then theoretically that block “has” broadband.
“My father wrote about this in his book. Chapter 1… Page 1… Paragraph 1: What is the answer to 99 out of 100 questions?… Money.”
Not surprisingly, this cliche is applicable here: the vast majority of people simply cannot afford broadband service. The US has the third most expensive broadband internet in the developed world, mostly because there’s not much competition. (Iceland and Norway rank first and second, respectively, if you’re wondering.)
The gap between the connected and the not isn’t being lessened anytime soon. Last week, AT&T announced that it is suspending its fiber service, leaving tens of millions of DSL-only homes without an internet connection whatsoever. And AT&T has no interest in replacing DSL in these predominately poor, rural areas with some other technology. Earlier this year, Congress passed a law requiring the FCC to change how they measure internet access. But the $65 million required to implement this law, Ajit Pai, Chairman of the FCC under President Trump, claims just isn’t there. The FCC is currently promoting new technologies like 5G cellular and low-orbit satellites to address this problem of internet connectivity, but these seem too far in the future to meet the immediate demands a majority of Americans are facing right now.
The inadequacy of internet connectivity is presumably less in areas within and around college campuses, where access to public Wifi is available. However, with online learning in place for many this year and into 2021, students, whether they be in college or at the K-12 level, are attending classes remotely (on Zoom, Skype, etc.): no one, therefore, can assume they have quality internet connection.
Before I crossed over into the tech world, I was in academia. And to be sure, my peers and colleagues in higher learning are showing just how fraught with frustration things are getting. Just look at this Facebook post from one of my former professors last Thursday:
Things aren’t looking good; in fact, they look really bad. After reading this, I wondered how many of the students aren’t attending, or can’t productively engage, because they have a bad internet connection: they can’t follow the lecture because their signal drops or there’s a time lag, etc., etc., etc. Many students with low or no internet connectivity are being marked absent from the classroom, whether they are there or not. How can you speak if no one can hear you? How can you be seen if you aren’t visible?
There’s understandable outrage by many college students still paying full tuition despite attending lectures at home: lawsuits have been filed against institutions like Yale (and rightfully so: $55K seems pretty exorbitant when your lecture hall and dorm are beside your parents’ bedroom). But perhaps even more lamentable than the loss of those precious years of college life because of Covid-19 are the K-12 students (elementary, middle, and high school) whose dreams of attending such institutions will be deferred if not destroyed because of internet bandwidth.
CEO of Cosync, Richard Krueger, and I believe there’s an emergent solution that will help to breach the broadband divide that I’ve spotlighted here: offline-first capability. What does that mean? Simply put, it means that you don’t have to be continuously online in order to connect or communicate or collaborate with others at the app level.
At Cosync, we’re in the process of developing a set of class structures or schemas that exist on top of MongoDB Realm that model a collaborative app, essentially a middle layer that simplifies app development even further. The acceleration of collaborative app development Cosync enables will, through an offline-first system like MongoDB Realm, satisfy the increasingly high demand for new and innovative ways to connect, communicate, and collaborate.
MongoDB Realm is a new option for app developers, an offline-first database platform that’s collaboratively asynchronous, or “off-line first.” “Offline-first,” what MongoDB Realm calls a “mentality,” is based on a presumption that’s safe for at least half of the US population to make: whatever you’re doing, your internet connection will drop.
Realm Sync handles network access and conflict resolution in a background thread of an application, so that application logic stays the same regardless of network conditions. To quote from their website:
After you make changes to the local realm on the client device, the Realm SDK automatically sends the changes to the server as soon as possible. Likewise, the Realm SDK automatically receives changes from the server and integrates those changes into the local realm. In effect, you continue to work with the local realm without moment-to-moment concern for network connectivity or lack thereof.
Eventually, most apps need to share that data with the outside world. Consider a few examples they mention:
- A team collaborates in real-time on a shared document across the Internet.
- A front-line worker fills out a report while working somewhere with low or no network connectivity.
- An IoT device uploads its sensor data to the cloud.
Theoretically, these real-life examples can extend to every aspect of our active daily life, or put more accurately, our active lives that have become since Covid-19 almost entirely virtual. The implications of MongoDB Realm’s Sync solution are, as I’ve stated before, revolutionary: it provides users with the ability to interact with local data — to asynchronously collaborate at the app level — regardless of whether they’re connected to the internet.
In the case of online learning via teleconferencing apps like Zoom and Skype, there’s now a very real chance for app developers using MongoDB Realm and Cosync to create apps that do not require continuous internet connectivity in order to use them. Only since the release of MongoDB Realm and Cosync will such asynchronous collaborative technologies be able to proliferate. In this drastic pivot to online education, those enabling technologies will help to ensure that no student gets left behind.
