A few years back, I was invited to a meeting of telecom professionals in Georgia to talk about the state of broadband in rural Georgia. Most of us had been involved in fiber to the home projects, and most of us were from the Atlanta metro area. Technologist after technologist got up to talk about how poor our broadband choices were compared to the rest of the world and how we should be pushing hard to get 1 Gbps (1000 Mbps) service throughout Georgia as fast as possible. One attendee even argued that we were setting our sights too low and should be legislating and investing in ubiquitous 10 Gbps services.

The final speaker was from a government agency that studied utilities usage in rural areas of our state. He very calmly explained to all of us that we were trying to move too far, too fast. He explained that in many rural areas, people did not understand why they need a computer – much less a broadband connection. These were areas where even the schools did not have internet access – and if they did, it was 1 Mbps or less. He asked those in the room to think of ways to get something usable into those areas without waiting for the political will and costs necessary to leapfrog to the next generation.

It was an interesting wake up call to us in the room, and one that I suspect many ignored. Those of us who spend our days talking about the latest in technology, those of us who rely on fast broadband for our livelihoods, and those of us who live in areas where we are fortunate to be able to complain about 90 Mbps download speeds can forget that we are not the majority. If we were going to meet the needs of that organization – widespread broadband deployment – we were going to have to step back, slow down, and come up with other recommendations.

A few years later, I was talking with a data center company in the Netherlands who was looking to expand their capacity between two sites. We went in with our standard presentation on 100 Gbps transmission, moving to 200 Gbps and 400 Gbps in the future. We talked about terabits per second capacity on a fiber. The customer then told us that what they really needed was to upgrade their single 1 Gigabit Ethernet (1 Gbps) service to something faster.

Again, we were looking too far, too fast for our customer. Fortunately, we did have a solution to offer that was more in line with what they needed, and we even managed to allow them to offer leased bandwidth to their customers at no additional cost. We put in a WDM system with 40 channel capacity. The customer used about 10 of the channels and, for almost no additional cost, was able to lease out the other 30 channels as a new revenue stream. A smaller company, for example a startup developing high speed optical interconnections and with a more limited portfolio, would have been shut out of the business.

In the case of the rural Georgia bandwidth initiative, we did step back and come up with a few recommendations that were more realistic. We recommended connectivity to schools and libraries so that people would get used to what broadband access could provide. We recommended working with utilities, educational, and government groups that already had fiber across the state to put in carrier hotel and internet exchange facilities from which services could be expanded. We recommended that we set goals for DSL deployments and wireless expansions in areas where fiber was prohibitive to get a baseline in place. Rather than a recommendation that started with the fastest and furthest looking, we took a step back and made a recommendation that would meet the needs of those who were requesting the information in the first place.

The hope of the group was that once a baseline was established, we would no longer have to explain to people why internet access is a good thing. And once demand was created, the service would follow. It is always easier to build from an established base – whether it is putting in that first WDM system for an expanding data center customer or setting up broadband options in rural Georgia – than to go too far, too fast and leave them behind.