We ran fiber optic cables across the ocean floor. We cannot get internet to rural West Virginia.
This is not a technology problem. Your wifi sucks because capitalism decided you don't matter.
The internet is a convoluted, multi-layered network of networks. As global reliance on high-speed connectivity intensifies, broadband is transitioning from a luxury to a critical national utility. Internet connection has become essential for economic development, education, and public governance.
But, even in 2026, there’s a chance your internet connection still sucks. It’s not your fault. It’s not even Spectrum’s fault—though I love to blame them for all my woes. No, the reason your digital connectivity is molasses has a lot more to do with the folks in the government.
By the time we’re done here, you’re going to understand the wizardry of the web. I’m going to explain all the big words tech bros love to name drop: modems, bandwidth, and that $40 billion check the government is writing to try and fix this mess. Buckle up because by the end of this, you’ll be more confident in this area than the tech bros.
The first thing you have to realize is that the internet isn’t some magical juju floating in the air or whatever that non-ionizing radiation 5G was supposed to cause is. The internet is built up of numerous physical things. Everything you see online is transmitted through a physical signal. Sometimes it’s wired, like fiber optics using light waves. Sometimes it’s wireless, like a radio wave flying through the air. Dig back deep into your high school chemistry or physics class and remember that waves are physical things!
I’m gonna break up these internet concepts into how the connection reaches a location (Connection Types), the hardware that manages it (Network Devices), and the metrics used to measure its quality (Performance Metrics). Then, we’ll discuss a little about policy. But, honestly, that’s a larger discussion for some follow-up articles.
I. Internet Connection Types
People get confused between a telecom and an ISP. A telecommunications company, or telecom, provides the actual physical pipes and infrastructure that move information over long distances—we’re talking voice, data, video. An ISP, or Internet Service Provider, is a subset of that. They are the ones who actually let you, the user, onto the internet. Spectrum is a classic ISP, whereas a giant like AT&T acts as both an ISP and a telecom because they handle your phone lines and your web access. Now let’s get into the physical infrastructure they could provide you.
Legacy Copper-Based Connections
Dial-up is the earliest public internet connection method from 1992. Analog audio signals (basically normal-ole sound waves) travel through the telephone lines. It is super slow, and makes it impossible to use the telephone while you are on the internet.
It was a great place to start, but I’d consider it the F-tier of modern internet connection. It’s obsolete. If you’re still on dial-up, you’re basically limited to checking email and praying.
DSL (digital subscriber line) also sends data over the telephone lines. However, this data uses higher frequencies that do not interfere with your phone calls.
DSL is often still used in rural areas. But DSL speed significantly drops the further away you are from the provider’s central office
Cable internet delivers high-speed internet through the coaxial cables your television uses. Cable is super fast and widely available in cities and the suburbs. However, it uses a shared architecture, so your speeds can fluctuate based on how many of your neighbors are online at the same time. (Your neighbors are eating into your bandwidth).
High-Speed Connections
Fiber optic is the S-tier, the gold standard, the crème de la crème. Fiber optic is fast and reliable. It’s called “fiber” for the glass strands in the wire. It’s called “optic” because it uses pulses of light to send the data (as opposed to an audio signal like in DSL and dial-up).
Most of the internet runs on fiber optic. There are even huge fiber optic cables running on the ocean floor between the continents. Unlike the previously mentioned wired methods, fiber optic allows for you to upload data just as fast as you can download, which is helpful for video conferencing (equal upload and download speed is called symmetric speeds).
BPL (broadband over power line) is an interesting option that transmits data over the pre-existing electrical power lines. While it avoids new cabling, it never became mainstream due to heavy electrical noise and interference with radio communications.
Wireless & Satellite Connections
Satellite. Think Starlink. Low-earth orbit spacecrafts connect you to the internet. This is awesome for remote areas where setting up cables is impossible. Older systems are slower (higher latency) because they are further away from the earth. The lower the satellite is to the earth, the faster your connection speed.
Satellite is expensive, but likely the way of the future. (Why? Because policy! BEAD was initially only building out fiber optic connections, but now also supports funding for satellite.)
Fixed wireless requires you to set up an antenna on your building. Your antenna then transmits data via radio waves to a local transmission tower. This is a cost effective solution for rural areas, but it requires clear line-of-sight between the antenna and the tower. Rainy or foggy weather can disrupt your connection.
Mobile internet connects devices like smartphones to cell towers via radio waves. Mobile internet enables high-speed mobile data and “fixed wireless access” (FWA) for homes. Each generation (4G, 5G) uses more efficient data encoding to increase speed.
II. Key Network Devices
Now I want to explain some things about how you actually get internet and wifi inside your home. I’m that phase of life where I move every 11 months, so I’ve set up my routers countless times. Inside your house, you’ve got two main boxes: the modem and the router.
The modem is the translator. It takes that analog signal from the wire outside and turns it into digital signals your computer can actually understand. The router then takes that digital signal and acts like a traffic cop, directing it to your iPhone, your smart TV, or even your smart fridge.
Every device on your local Wi-Fi gets an IP address, which is like a temporary postal address that can change. Your device also has a MAC address (a Media Access Control address), which is unique and hard coded into the hardware. It never changes. It’s the permanent ID of that specific piece of equipment.
III. Performance Metrics
Then there’s broadband. In researching these topics the word broadband was thrown around a ton, and at first it confused me. A lot. But it’s actually pretty simple. Broadband is a generic term for high-speed internet that you can connect to 24/7. Right now, the FCC defines broadband as 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. Basically, broadband is a internet speed threshold. If you’re above it, you’ve got the good stuff; if you’re below it, your internet might exist, but it isn’t “broadband”. Remember that Hank Green net neutrality video? If the width of the shower pipe is the bandwidth, the speed that the water is actually hitting your face is the broadband.
But speed isn’t everything. You’ve also got to look at the quality, which comes down to latency, jitter, and packet loss. Latency is just a fancy word for lag. Latency is the time it takes for a data packet to travel to the destination and back. Jitter is when that lag starts changing and getting inconsistent. Last, packet loss is when pieces of your data just vanish into the void. It’s like streaming a show where frames go missing. The network has to keep rerequesting the data, creating this nasty spiral that slows everything to a crawl.
IV. A Brief Glimpse into Policy
Now, why does your connection still suck? Because policy hasn’t kept up with reality. Every president since Clinton has promised to fix rural broadband, but we’re still waiting. The current FCC definition of 100/20 Mbps is actually kind of slow and an outdated metric. Most of us have 600 Mbps or more at home. If the government builds a network that is slow today, imagine how much slower it will be tomorrow or ten years from now.
Also, slow internet doesn’t just affect rural areas. You can map modern slow internet speeds to home redlining of the 1950s. See Digitally Invisible. I read this book and will outline my learnings in another piece.
Most recently, the BEAD program—Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment—was launched with about $40 billion in funding under Joe Biden’s infrastructure act. Originally, it was all about fiber, but now the policy is becoming “technologically neutral.” They’re starting to support satellite and fixed wireless in those hard to reach rural areas. I think this is is an interesting look at how politicians make rules for technology they might not fully understand. We’ll get more into this another day.
The government is even allowing states to skip “high cost” locations if they’re too expensive to serve. To me, that’s a market failure. The private market didn’t serve those areas, and that is exactly when the government should step in. It’s like the Post Office. They still have to deliver your mail even if you live in the middle of a forest, even if it’s expensive, even if they are losing funding, because it’s a public service. Why should your internet access be any different?
We need figure out how to connect everyone to the Internet as soon as possible, so we don’t create a digital divide that can never close.