<aside> 👨🏽 Hey, I’m Tehseen! Over the past few years, I’ve developed a passion for traveling, specifically to developing nations, and learning about lifestyle discrepancies and the technological and commercial landscape of these nations. I’ve spent the last two years combining my passion for emerging technology (started with blockchain, and now ML) with global problems like a lack of ubiquitous Internet access, which I believe is our world’s largest blocker to human progress. Here is my first crack at a solution…
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<aside> ✉️ If anything here piques your interest, please reach out:
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https://www.loom.com/share/1d932fe1dceb4b31a549789e683aff11?sid=b83cfe50-a415-460a-9336-139b6c3e3bfb
When teaching in Tanzania I noticed my students had the most fun not listening to my grammar lessons or making fun of my broken Swahili, but instead when I played them videos on my laptop. Using the Internet to learn was an entirely foreign concept and I had the privilege of using my mobile hotspot to expose these kids to resources like Kahn Academy and Youtube (no ChatGPT at the time) that have been critical to my educational development.
My classroom in Moshi, Tanzania
Upon returning home, I was inspired to help provide these kids that opportunity again so I began cold calling to raise money for laptops and Starlink Internet access. But after raising thousands of dollars, building an entire computer lab, and implementing Internet access, I was faced with one of the most transformative failures of my life.
Given the rural location of the NGO, Starlink could provide a basic connection for one-off Google searches, but when it came to high-bandwidth videos or Zoom calls, the connection was insufficient. This failure propelled me down the rabbit hole of why Starlink wasn’t the solution and what the technical barriers were to global ubiquitous connection. Here we are today.
https://x.com/tehseen____/status/1717356086775120366?s=20
When watching a YouTube video here in Toronto, I am making a request for data to be routed to my local network from the closest Google data center in New Albany, Ohio. This data center breaks the video into small chunks of data called data packets and routes them through a series of different fiber optic cable networks to reach me here in Toronto.
The algorithm used to decide which path to route the data through is called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which takes in multiple factors, called attributes, to make its routing decision.
BGP is used to make the decision for the number of “hops” between networks, called Autonomous Systems. Other attributes of the network include which preferred path based on business relationships between ISPs (Internet Service Providers), local network preference, minimizing costs, optimizing speed, and a few others.
BGP can be compared to OSPF (Open Shortest Path First), which is an internal gateway protocol that decides on the routing of data within networks as opposed to between different networks like BGP. OSPF specifically uses an algorithm called Dijkstra’s algorithm and prefers the fastest path > the shortest path instead of the numerous factors used by BGP. Because of the optimized design of OSPF within a network, this optimization project focuses solely on BGP.
Through industry research and talking to experts, I have learned that the high barriers to innovation within this industry have stifled its innovation and thus, the software used in routing algorithms has room for further optimization.