It’s a dirty little secret that U.S. carriers and telcos don’t want you to know: Networking in this country is terrible. U.S. broadband speeds lag behind South Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia, and many others.

The country that is the home of Silicon Valley, which has created so many computing advances, is also home to a dysfunctional political system, one that has buckled to the fierce political lobbying largely responsible for our second-class networks.

In her recent book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, Susan Crawford finds numerous parallels between today’s media conglomerates and the railroad robber barons from the first Gilded Age. More than 30 years of deregulation and a recent spate of mergers has been driving up prices for consumers, while technology is actually making it cheaper for carriers to deliver those services.

Of course, businesses get hit by the perfect storm of high costs and sketchy service even harder than consumers. One silver lining is that in an entrepreneurial economy networking roadblocks inevitably spur innovation. Businesses are better positioned than consumers to deal with our underperforming networks because they can lean on dedicated MPLs lines, Content Delivery Networks and WAN Optimization equipment to help them overcome the Internet’s limitations. However, these come at a steep price.

But does it have to be so complicated and expensive? Are business-class service providers simply taking advantage of the pathetic state of our public Internet to gouge businesses? Or are they solving real problems, problems that would exist independent of industry political meddling?

In the coming weeks, I’ll be attending two influential networking trade shows, Interop and CTIA, to see what ideas networking thought leaders have for overcoming these problems. One trend I’ve seen percolating for a few years that I want to check back in on is using the cloud to solve networking issues.

Actually, this trend isn’t new. Clear back in the dotcom era, plenty of service providers (ASPs, MSPs, etc.) emerged to tackle complex computing challenges, delivering their solutions as services. It didn’t pan out in the dotcom era; the same trend limped along during the early cloud era, but now real business-class services are being delivered directly from the cloud, often obviating the need for any end-user-side hardware.

“One thing I’ve always loved about Interop is that you can see the future of networking now. That may sound like a cliché, but for any networking challenge you are having, you’ll usually find numerous solutions,” said Ajit Gupta, CEO of Aryaka Networks. He should know, as the founder of Speedera Networks (acquired by Akamai for north of $500 million in 2005), Gupta helped pioneer the Content Delivery Network (CDN) concept.

Now, Gupta believes that the best way to boost the performance of enterprise-class WANs is to turn to the cloud in order to improve the Internet – while also pushing down costs in the process.

“At the most basic level, moving data across a network is simple. It’s just packets. But once you take into account things like QoS, data caching, data synching, congestion, dropped packets – I could go on and on – the simple becomes almost mind-bogglingly complex. That’s why you’ll see all of these complicated, expensive WAN optimization boxes everywhere. As with so many cloud providers, what we’re trying to do is abstract complexity, so businesses can shift their focus away from complicated networking configurations and back to their business goals. We’ll handle the complicated WAN acceleration part. All you need to do is set the parameters of the service you want.”

As with so many other cloud service providers, Aryaka intends to transform complicated business systems into a simple service. This approach – in theory anyway – drives down costs, making the service available to the mid-market. Targeting the mid-market is an important strategic decision. These companies can’t afford expensive, dedicated hardware, nor can they hire the specialized IT personnel needed to maintain and manage it.

At Interop, I’ll also meet with Aryaka and a few of its competitors (Riverbed, Ipanema Technologies, Blue Coat Systems) to see what the industry consensus is. Is something as complicated as WAN Optimization really going to be hardware-free in the near term? How will this change the nature of broadband in coming years?

Looking ahead to CTIA later in the month, I’ll demo 4G LTE handsets to see if we may just leapfrog over our underperforming wired broadband networks with such wireless technologies as Muni WiFi, WiMAX and 4G LTE. In other words, is carrier competition going to improve wireless broadband while wired broadband continues to underperform in all but a few lucky markets (Kansas City, Austin, Provo)? Of course, these are often the same players responsible for many of the ills outlined in Crawford’s book, so I don’t want to get ahead of myself discussing the promise of wireless broadband.

A lot of innovated networking technology is hitting the market this year. Hopefully, industry lobbyists won’t muck it up. Stay tuned.

Jeff Vance is a journalist who has been covering tech trends for more than a dozen years.