The Quixotic Quest for Universal Broadband

Tonight I'm privileged to give a talk at the Ann Arbor Computer Society. I first spoke there in spring of 1993, when the subject was this newfangled thing called "the World-Wide Web." (Back then, it was hyphenated, kind of like Berners-Lee.)

For quite a while I've wanted to find or create a graph that shows how many years it takes for a technology -- telephone, electricity, indoor plumbing, CD players, dial-up Internet access, residential broadband -- to achieve 90% or 98% penetration.

It turns out the FCC took a stab at creating such a graph:



The source for the graph is:

http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Notices/2000/fc00057a.pdf

The FCC offers a collection of reports on Internet and telecom deployment at:

http://www.fcc.gov/wcb/iatd/comp.html