Addressing the digital divide from Iowa to Pakistan

The Iowa State College of Engineering published a short piece about my work on ARA. It covers what I have been doing since starting the PhD, and traces the line between the rural broadband mission I am on now and the years I spent in telecom in Pakistan before grad school.

Two things I want to add to it here.

The first is that the digital divide is not an American problem or a Pakistani one. It is the same shape in both places. The towns are different sizes, the regulations differ, the languages spoken at the kitchen table change. But the experience of a network that fails when you actually need it, and the way that failure cascades into homework, into a clinic visit, into a family business, is the same everywhere I have seen it. ARA is built for rural Iowa, and what we learn from it travels much further than Iowa.

The second is that what makes ARA worth working on is that it is real. There are radios on towers, fiber in the ground, software running on compute nodes we wired up by hand, and farmers and educators using the network for things they care about. Research that survives that level of contact with the world tends to be better research.

If you want the longer version of how I got here, my Story page has it.