Broadband beyond the prairie

The Iowa State University Foundation published a piece on the ARA project in their Foundation Forward magazine. It opens with a memory I had almost forgotten: the first months in Ames, when I could not reliably reach my parents in Pakistan because the broadband at their end could not keep a call alive. I had not really thought about how much of the work I do at WiCI is animated by exactly that kind of memory until Susan Flansburg, the writer, asked.

The piece sits on two ideas worth surfacing on their own. The first, from Hongwei Zhang, is that “our shared future depends on connectivity.” It is an unfashionable thing to say in a moment when most public conversation is about AI capabilities, but the network that AI rides on has to reach everyone, or AI just amplifies the divides we already have. The second is more technical and more useful: the rural problem is not solved by adding more of the same urban infrastructure. Cell towers spaced every half mile do not work where there are half miles of corn between buildings. Different problem, different solution.

If you want the longer story behind both points, check the forward magazine story here.