Broadband Follow-up

On The Roundtable yesterday we talked about some of the issues about broadband particularly in areas where it's not available. There is another way to look at the problem: from the other side.

We do know how to minimize broadband requirements, and doing so might help people but at the potential cost of making broadband building efforts less urgent. The question is do we want broadband in all its glory or do we want people to get things done even if they don't have broadband?

The party line is that if you don't have broadband, you can't participate fully in the new web. That's true in many ways (I've certainly said it), but you can still participate in some ways. I know as a developer I periodically receive updates and exhortations about best practices and work-arounds in website development including issues regarding mobile phones and apps (I've written about this several times), universal access (not in the hardware sense but in the sense of people with difficulties hearing and seeing), and even platform- and software-specific features that can degrade site performance or make sites not viewable for some people (is it a handicap if you don't have Flash on your computer, iPhone or iPad?). And don't get me started on the sites (mostly financial services) that don't work properly on the Mac.

In all of these cases, we know how to deal with these issues and make sites work. The cost of making an individual site accessible to all people, all modern operating systems (forget DOS), and all connection speeds isn't great: the major component is imagination. And there are work-arounds.

The leader, as it so often is in web technologies is Google:  http://www.google.com/gwt/n

There are parallel sites for mobile devices that do the same thing on a site-by-site basis achieving results that may look better. Look at http://m.youtube.com/.

Something could certainly be done immediately simply with education and awareness -- for the public and for website developers. (Just do a Google search for "low bandwidth sites.") Why that's not happening is a mystery to me, and I can only surmise that there is some reason to think that it's broadband-or-nothing. There are intermediate options that are available while we wait for broadband which is certainly an important goal that should not be lost sight of.

A good first step for an individual site is to look at it with the Google tool to see how it looks in a low bandwidth version. This requires exactly no technical savvy.  Then, for an individual website, consider if that's OK or do you want a parallel low-bandwidth or mobile site that is certainly less expensive than building a site from scratch. And, in the future, you can bear in mind all of these accessibility issues (and even promote alternate versions on your website so that people can bookmark them).

There are small steps to take on the road to broadband. It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing.