Events

Internet For All - High-Speed Broadband for Every Home in the United States

Electrical and Computer Engineering
Lecture / Panel
 
For NYU Community
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Speaker

Henning Schulzrinne
Levi Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University.

Title

"Internet For All - High-Speed Broadband for Every Home in the United States"

Abstract

Since 2010, the U.S. government has created a number of programs to build out internet access in high-cost areas, along with attempts to make internet access available to low-income households, schools, libraries and health clinics. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) allocated $42.5 billion for broadband deployment as the BEAD (Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment), with the goal of providing 100 Megabit or faster high-quality internet access to every household and small business in the 56 states and territories within four years of selecting providers. (This amount is roughly four times the total NSF budget.) NTIA (National Telecommunications and Information Administration), located within the Department of Commerce, administers the BEAD project. I served two years on the BEAD policy team. In this talk, I will discuss:

  •  Why subsidize rural broadband? What has been tried before?
  • What are the difficult policy choices in getting to 100% deployment?
  • What roles do bespoke software, "big data," and data analysis play in administering complex grant programs?
  • How do government teams work in practice?

About Speaker

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne, Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, with Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. MTS at AT&T Bell Laboratories; associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin); now CS and EE departments at Columbia University. Chair of Computer Science 2004 to 2009; Engineering Fellow, Technical Advisor and Chief Technology Officer of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 2010-2017; technology fellow for Sen. Wyden in 2019-2020; now broadband advisor at NTIA. Protocol standards co-developed by him, including RTP, RTSP and SIP, are now used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. Fellow of the ACM and IEEE.

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