Internet for All—High-Speed Broadband for Every Home in the United States – Henning Schulzrinne

Gerald M. Masson Distinguished Lecture Series
October 9, 2025

“Internet for All—High-Speed Broadband for Every Home in the United States”
Henning Schulzrinne, Columbia University

Since 2010, the U.S. government has created a number of programs to build out internet access in high-cost areas, along with attempts to make internet access available to low-income households, schools, libraries, and health clinics. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $42.5 billion for broadband deployment via the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, with the goal of providing 100 megabit or faster high-quality internet access to every household and small business in the 56 states and territories within four years of selecting providers. (This amount is roughly four times the total NSF budget.) The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, located within the Department of Commerce, administers the BEAD Program. Schulzrinne served two years on the BEAD policy team; in his talk, he will discuss: 1) Why subsidize rural broadband? What has been tried before? Can’t we all get satellite service already? 2) What are the difficult policy choices in getting to 100% deployment? 3) What roles do bespoke software, “big data,” and data analysis play in administering complex grant programs? and 4) How do government teams work in practice?

Henning Schulzrinne is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Mathematical Methods and Computer Science and a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University. Previously, he was a member of technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, and an associate department head at the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems in Berlin. A Fellow of the ACM and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Schulzrinne served as chair of Columbia's Department of Computer Science from 2004 to 2009, and from 2010 through 2017 he worked with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission as an engineering fellow, a technical advisor, and its chief technology officer. From 2019 to 2020, he served as a technology fellow in the office of Senator Ron Wyden, advancing efforts to protect data against illegal searches, improving broadband availability for rural and low-income households, and preventing identity theft. From 2022 to 2024, Schulzrinne acted as broadband advisor to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, working on broadband deployment for rural and low-income areas. Protocol standards he co-developed—including the Real-Time Transport Protocol, Real-Time Streaming Protocol, and Session Initiation Protocol—are now used by almost all internet telephony and multimedia applications. Schulzrinne received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.