  Broadband Internet service is widely expected to be the fundamental universal
service for the 21st century. But more than a decade of national and
international struggles to close the digital divide between broadband haves and
have nots suggest that reaching global universality will be a very difficult
task. This paper argues that the strong guarantees made by the current
broadband paradigm - low latency and constant availability - are unnecessary
obstacles to its adoption as an affordable and universal digital service. We
show that there is nonetheless a plausible strategy for deploying a Basic
Broadband service that does not require such guarantees and is able to offer,
at reasonable cost, almost all the critical and valuable services and
applications currently delivered over low latency broadband, synchronous
telepresence excepted.
