Lawrence Roberts, founder and CTO, Caspian Networks

High up in the wooded hills above Silicon Valley, Lawrence Roberts can view much of what he hath wrought as one of the founding fathers of the Internet. “I can see the whole valley from my house. I can see 600 square miles.”

But one thing this Internet titan can't do, however ironic it may seem, is access the Web at broadband speeds. Roberts, the Caspian Networks founder who recently resigned his CEO, chairman and president posts there but remains chief technology officer, cannot get cable modem service or DSL service at his rural home. “There's no way to get broadband up in the hills. AT&T Cable has not converted to digital here yet. I can't get DSL from the telephone company. Sprint said they can't get me MMDS. I've tried every source except satellite.”

Instead, Roberts uses one of his 20 home telephone lines to dial up to the Internet and tends to leave the connection on all day, letting e-mails flow in at a snail's pace. “It's actually not too bad,” he said. “It takes an e-mail with a document attachment a while to filter in, but dial-up modems now have substantial compression, and it doesn't take as long as you would think.”

Still, Roberts — who has his own home page and has written many white papers on the history and continuing growth of the Internet — knows exposure to a broadband connection at home would vastly change his experience and increase his usage.

“About 70% to 80% of Internet traffic growth is coming from corporate growth, and more of that is coming from broadband,” he said. “It could double personal usage overnight and make a huge impact.”

As evidence, Roberts said residential users in Asian countries — particularly Korea, where broadband access has boomed — tend to use many advanced applications that dial-up speeds make difficult such as online gaming.

The shortcomings of the nascent broadband economy in the U.S. are both financial and technical, Roberts said. Neither telcos nor cable TV companies have made sufficient investments to ensure wide availability of broadband here. Also, quality of service was not enough of a consideration in early broadband deployment and needs to be improved.

The result of these shortcomings is that consumers in need can't get broadband — not just the well-heeled in their remote hideaways. Still, if Henry Ford couldn't get his hands on an automobile, that would have been something to talk about, too, wouldn't it?—Dan O'Shea