On the Tuesday of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States, productivity at the office where I work ground to halt (as I assume it did at many other offices around the world), while I and nearly all of my thirty co-workers huddled around a single computer to watch the ceremony.

We watched it online, and I don’t think it ever occurred to any of us to turn on our television instead; and we watched it collectively, partly because we understood the historic import of the moment and wanted to share that moment, but also because we’d each discovered that our Internet service provider was choking on the sudden surge in demand for bandwidth: watching at our workstations, the video stuttered and gasped.  Only by leaving our desks and coming together to a single location were any of us able to watch the ceremony.

“Social media” indeed.

The Inauguration was the most streamed video in the history of the Internet, with approximately 7.7 million simultaneous downloads — and ISPs throughout the country struggled to meet the sudden demand.  This inadvertently called some attention to one of Obama’s campaign promises: to deliver higher-quality broadband to more Americans.  (The U.S. was ranked 15th in per-capita broadband penetration in 2007, and falling.)

“This really is a utility,” said Obama advisor (and University of Michigan law professor) Susan Crawford.  “This is like water, electricity, sewage systems — something that all Americans need in order to succeed in the modern era.”

It is not yet clear what shape Obama’s broadband plan will take, nor how aggressive — or progressive — it will be.  Early indications are that the Obama administration will offer tax breaks for building out broadband infrastructure — a strategy that will heavily favor already-incumbent providers such as Verizon and Comcast.  But activist groups favor more innovative, and competitive, solutions,  and argue that further funding this duopoly is the wrong approach.  “Broadband is a great way to create thousands of new jobs,” says S. Derek Turner, research director at Free Press. “But we have to do it in the right way.”

[ADDENDUM: Yochai Benkler, a man who has an opinion or two about how network availability can transform the way we work and think, just posted some of the newly-released details of the broadband stimulus plan, and says he's "reasonably optimistic."]