The Endless OS Foundation is Taking on The Connectivity Challenge

By Matt Dalio

For years, it seemed like the Internet was everywhere. But in recent months, when 20% of American students could no longer show up to school because they don't have a connected device, internet access, or both, the illusion was shattered.

The reality is, half the world’s population doesn’t have access to broadband internet. That would be understandable in 2002, but in 2020, it’s chilling. Worse yet, internet growth is slowing. 

What’s holding us back? 

The internet is not a cloud. It is built with shovels. It has cables and towers. High costs and the engineering challenges of remote geographies are two significant challenges. The further you travel from population centers, the more it costs. Meanwhile, the further you travel, the fewer people there are, and the less money those people have to pay for the system. The math is simple: few people who have little money can’t pay for the high cost of connecting them.

There are some countries that have chosen to invest where the private market won’t. China, for reference, has committed a trillion dollars to build its internet infrastructure. But market forces are not going to invest trillions of dollars across the entire planet.

And yes, affordable satellite internet will take another many years to rise, if it ever does.

Connecting the whole world to unlimited internet is virtually impossible. 

But at Endless, we think that’s just because many think of the internet as a very rigid thing. It’s bandwidth. Do you ever ask yourself what server your video downloaded from? How about that Google search; do you ever ask yourself how recent that recipe and fitness tip are? 

It is in these questions that we have found an answer to solve for an accessible internet.  Is it the infrastructure that people want? Of course it isn’t. They want the stuff within it. 

Communication, like messages, are really important and also really cheap. A tweet is 140 bytes. A 1 GB data plan can send 7 million such messages. So communication is already solved for. When we talk about solving for internet connectivity, it’s really the content we’re solving for.

To get people access to the entirety of the web, you need bandwidth. But to get the stuff that most people want and use regularly, storage is a much cheaper route. The internet is an enormous, dynamic place, but the actual parts that most people use take up hardly any space.

The importance of this cannot be overstated.

Bear with the math: the average webpage today is 2 MB. Let’s assume you visit 300 pages a day. You can store every webpage you have ever been on inside of a 4 TB hard drive that costs $100. 

Storage today is massive. 

What most people consume is surprisingly predictable because of the Long Tail. While the internet has vast quantities of data, the majority of clicks are on a fraction of the internet. While these numbers may be old, 80% of all Wikipedia searches are for around 3% of articles. About 75% of clicks on all Google Searches are for the first five links. Wikipedia is usually one of those. In other words, we need a fraction of the internet in order to deliver much of its value.

Now let’s make this concept a little more sophisticated. Data is often available at some point, like all of the stories we read about kids doing homework in the parking lot of their local library. You can update the content on your device when you connect, and then it’s available at home.

Another layer of magic: carriers have a ton of spare network capacity in the middle of the night. Carriers can use that empty bandwidth to push updates over night at very cheap prices, so your computer has all of the day’s news, videos, classes and memes waiting for you to view.

This concept of using storage to reduce the cost of bandwidth already powers the internet, with a technology called CDNs. Your internet providers use local servers to store websites, reducing their data costs. Estimates suggest that about 75% of internet traffic flows through these CDNs. Your phone does the same thing, using storage to work better on a mobile connection. It allows you to access apps and content even when you’re offline by updating itself when it’s online.

It is a simple insight: Download content to apps. Refresh them when you are connected. It is an App Based Internet. You can download your stuff to your apps at different times than you consume it. Your email client works this way, as do many games, songs and apps. 

We embed this insight into the very fabric of the Endless operating system. We embed all of this stuff at the heart of the OS. It is an entire app ecosystem built with this concept in mind. This allows you to have an experience that is a heck of a lot like having broadband on any connection

The Endless OS Foundation is working to create more access with an App Based Internet. Now that we have made a transition from a company to a foundation, we have the freedom to push this concept into the world beyond our own technology. We have partnered with people like Foundation for Learning Equality, World Possible, Kiwix and others to promote this concept. 

Powerhouses like Google, Facebook, and Apple, and really any app developer, can take this concept and run with it. The more people embrace this insight as they develop their technology, the more kids will have access to the value of the internet. 

We who have access to the unbounded internet feel the need to have access to everything. That’s the ideal solution. But until bandwidth is universal, it’s not right for years if not generations of people to be left behind. We're talking about people who don't have the internet right now. We're talking about the kids who live in a rural community in the US who spend hours sitting in the local McDonald's parking lot to do their homework after school, kids in inner cities who haven’t connected to their schools since COVID, small farmers in the developing world who hope their children will have more opportunities than they did, refugees who have no hope. 

Our goal isn’t to make everything on the internet available. It is to make the value of the internet available to everyone. It will cost factors of ten less to provide the other half of the world’s population with intelligent storage than it does to provide them with hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth. This solution works on today’s infrastructure. It isn’t speculation. It’s just software.

The gap in global connectivity is one of the greatest struggles of the connected era. We can’t wait to connect every person to boundless bandwidth. So let’s use a solution that works today.

Remember: Storage is cheaper than bandwidth.