# Approximate Networking for Universal Internet Access
## 1 Introduction  
The new global development agenda \"Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development\", composed of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), has recently been adopted by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2016. An important pillar of this movement is the need to ensure _social inclusion_, wherewith the society strives to achieve shared prosperity which reaches everyone in the society, including women, people from minorities and the bottom strata of human society. Due to the importance of Internet access--which has now become a key indicator of the potential of economic progress, with impact imprinted on all spheres of human life (personal, societal, political, economical, and educational) in both developing and developed countries--the provisioning of universal Internet access becomes an important stepping stone towards sustainable development the world over. The fact that Internet access can play a large role in facilitating development motivates the vision of _Global Access to the Internet for All_ (GAIA), currently being formally pursued in the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). While Internet has the capability of fostering development and growth,this potential is being thwarted by the inability of billions of people to access the Internet. According to recent statistics, almost six billion people do not have high-speed internet, which makes them unable to fully participate in the digital economy [1]. Bringing the Internet to the remaining billions of people left without will democratize knowledge, open up new opportunities, and undoubtedly open up avenues for sustained development. The overwhelming focus of the Internet research community has been on improving the ideal networking experience by providing increasingly higher throughputs along with lower latencies. However, this focus has led to an Internet design that is very costly, which has precluded the global deployment of the Internet. We see this in wired technologies such as the modern fiber-based broadband high-speed network, which come close to providing \"ideal network\" performance, have largely been restricted to urban centers and advanced countries, with economical reasons (primarily the high cost of laying fiber) precluding their universal deployment. Similarly, cellular technology--despite its great success--has not been able to ensure GAIA (since it is mainly an urban phenomena that cannot be used to cost effectively serve rural and remote areas [2; 3]). Since Internet is over-engineered for many practical applications and needs (i.e., not all applications and users of the Internet require high-fidelity Internet services), we argue that a viable GAIA-enabling approach is the use of \"_approximate networking_\", where context-appropriate trade-offs are adopted to deal with different challenges and impairments characterizing a certain region. We can loosely define approximate networks as networks that are close to ideal in terms of quality, nature, and quantity. We proposed the concept of approximate networking previously in [4], where the presentation of the concept focused on the use of simple approximate good-enough services to tame the complexity of the networking infrastructure in a future world afflicted with hard limits due to the exhaustion of natural resources, such as fossil fuels. In this paper, we argue that apart from its clear use in reducing network complexity with the complementary benefits of more sustainable, cheaper services, approximate networking can also be used to satisfy the widely-differing and diverse user requirements by taking _context-appropriate trade-offs_ and thereby help in realizing the vision of Global Access to the Internet for All (GAIA). Our main idea is, for universal Internet provisioning of mobile and Internet services, that it is time to move away from pursuing over-engineered \"perfect products\" and focus instead on developing appropriate \"good enough\" solutions.