Free Broadband Internet in Public Housing.

how close do you stand to people to know the cost of their equipment and the details of the applications they are using?

blackberries are down to less than $100 now.

I keep getting flyers to re-up...

Many of the people that I see have their Smartphones on their ears, and are talking loudly. It is rather obvious, especially if the individual is right in front of you on the checkout line.

Smartphones are larger than regular cellphones, and have a characteristic shape. Even if the person has gotten a "deal" on the phone, the cost of texting (which I see all the time) and media raises the price much higher than using the unit simply as a phone.

Yes, and I would question someone else's free steak dinners when I had to pay for ground beef.

Depending on the use case the difference in speed makes it nonfunctional. For example, I depend on VOIP for work, and VOIP is not forgiving of latency. The internet is a data connection, loading pages is just one thing to do with it and dialup precludes a lot more (and it's more than just watching videos, you are thinking of the difference only in the context of your web use).



No, more like the difference between a horse and a car, or a car and a plane. They are different in more than just speed, as an example the always on nature of non-dialup connections enables whole workflows that are not possible on dialup.



You pay for someone else's education, someone else's nuclear bombs, someone else's sidewalks and a whole lot of other really useless stuff already. This would actually be something that helps you too just like some of that spend. The connectivity of others doesn't just determine what they can do, but it determines what businesses are viable (breaking the "last mile monopoly" would be transformative to the telecommunications and TV/Cable industries) and how competitive your economy is.

As connectivity is becoming increasingly ubiquitous it is game changing. Whole industries like cloud computing, VOIP, IPTV and more depend on the notion of ubiquitous connectivity. Broadband is not just a speed convenience, it is a transformative difference in connectivity. Broadband allows cord cutting, dialup doesn't.

Providing broadband can be done cheaply (a couple dollars per person per month) and I'd cut off healthcare, 60% of the military, and even public education and libraries before cutting a spend like this, it's a no-brainer.

What would you rather have? A public library of public wifi? Wifi is cheaper (and much more transformative) than a library is and the degree to which your community is connected will affect economic growth for the whole community. Spending on internet infrastructure is a no-brainer, it's very cheap considering the bang for the buck.

Not necessarily, I spend less on my smartphone bill than most Americans do on their "dumb" phones.

In fact the old "dumb" phones are a data connection monopoly for telecos and allow them to charge exorbitant fees in their gatekeeper roles. On a "smart" phone you can do things like run skype to kill off their insane long distance charges, or use email to kill of their insane (it's cheaper to send data to the moon) texting charges.

"Smart" phones are just computers on a phone, and are simply not necessarily more expensive than "dumb" phones.

You old folks are witnessing a transformation of the landscape happening right under you and just not getting it at all. Smartphones are the new computers, in a few years more people will be accessing the internet from their smartphones than from computers.

It's not really a luxury, as you seem to think, it's not the new expensive phone it's the new cheap computer. Mobile and broadband are not luxuries, they are basic infrastructure for modern people.

that may have been the case a few years ago. It's simply not true anymore.

You're making judgments about people and how they use their resources, but you simply don't understand how the basics have changed. As jpb pointed out earlier, it would probably be a good idea to read your own sigline and really think about it.

_____

I was gobsmacked myself yesterday about the changes in one piece of technology and the associated costs. About 3 years ago, I bought an mp3 player for just under $200. I could listen to some music, store a handful of photos, and I could also listen to the radio.

I bought a new mp3 player for a particular purpose about a month ago. Same memory size as the old one - $15.

Last week, I picked up a new mp3 player for less than $50. 8x the memory, I can watch videos on it, download ebooks onto it and a few other things I haven't finished reading in the manual. There are enough wifi hotspots around where I work that I can easily access the internet for free on it, as it's 3G. $50, and I don't have to buy anything additional to make it more useful as an entertainment unit (other than $5 speakers, which are crazy good) than what the hamburgers spent thousands of dollars on not too long ago. Times and technology are changing so fast today - not keeping up isn't an option, and doesn't need to be an option.

I have to concede you are right, since I don't even know what that means. Whatever it is, do lots of people in public housing spend a lot of time doing it.

Well I don't just want it in public housing (but broadband growth is strongest among minorities and the poor), I want free broadband wifi to be as ubiquitous as street lights.

As to what it means:

VOIP = voice over ip, or internet telephony. You could replace your phone line with a service that costs dollars a month (e.g. you could pair a free google voice number with a low cost skype plan with unlimited US calls).

The benefit is not just cost, but cost is a big one. You can go to under $7/month for unlimited calls.

IPTV = TV over ip, or internet TV. The bottom line is that most houses have multiple connections of data. Phone, TV (cable), and internet usually piggybacks on one or is another one entirely. This is silly, the internet is a multi-function data connection that can do them all and achieve economy of scale.

Right now the way data is delivered is very user unfriendly, with telcos and cable companies reaming the customer because they usually enjoy little competition due to the historically high cost of entry to providing data services. By commoditizing the data connection the internet has leveled the playing field but the old world gatekeepers are still the masters of the "last mile" of cable to you and they are still reaming you while holding progress back (US drops to 22nd in broadband speed) for the sake of the margins that they are clinging to.

Providing the data connection is not expensive, the fastest broadband in the world was wired at $20/home and broadband is the product with the highest margins that the cable companies offer, it's priced not at cost but in relation to competition.

We should accelerate the breaking of these walled gardens. The US is falling behind in internet infrastructure after birthing it. Wiring the populace is not that expensive, we should ditch old-world concepts like libraries (though I love love loved them in the US) and the goal instead should be wifi on every street lamp.

there are things that I have to go to the library for, that are not available (free) on the web.

I'm not in any hurry to see it close...

Im simply quoting your words to make a point about phones and not aiming this at you or anyone else.


But

I JUST got a "smart" phone.
I got it from Radio Shack. 21.00
Its a Loft. Its considered a "smart phone" because you can use internet, GPS and many other things on it .
You put it right next to a blackberry.. and it is a carbon copy phone. Yet, not the 200.00 price tag.

My plan?
If I wanted to keep it super cheap, I can have this phone, text unlimited , have web access AND phone calls for under 25.00 a month. ( a bus pass costs 33.00.. just for perspective)

I got this phone so that I dont lose internet access. I would lose work if I didnt have access to the internet.

Yet, if you SAW ME with it. you would assume I spent a lot of money and that I was running with a 'new gadget' when it is quite the contrary.


There are specials now on Sprint, Tmobile and god knows who else about getting your phone free, and having unlimited packages of services in the 25.00 a month range.

You can also go BUY a used blackberry and keep it on a cheap plan.
for someone who may not be able to afford a 50.00 a month internet connection, plus a land line or even cheap cell phone, plus enough minutes to be able to talk, going a bundle route with a major company makes your connection bill half the cost if not less of everything listed above. Internet, phone and texting all in one gadget for cheaper than most people think. I can SEE why people with limited income go that route.

No need to afford the laptop, or desk top, no need for monthly wireless bills, router costs and landline phone bills. Kinda makes sense to me.

Robert, just out of curiosity, do you know how much wireless infrastructure that could buy with the same $2.1 million?

Depends on how you do it, there are coming advances to wifi (in a nutshell using different frequencies that travel much greater distances) that can really change things and it also depends on scale.

But the bottom line is that providing the money to the cable company is a stupid way to do it, they are probably paying an order of magnitude more than it would need to cost to put out municipal wifi.

In this article's model they are just subsidizing internet service at over $18/month per household using private networks that are charging large margins. I think this could be done at less than $3/month as a public utility. In a study by Jupiter Research (Municipal Wireless: Partner to Spread Risks and Costs While Maximizing Benefit Opportunities) that is several years old (and was considered a high figure back then) they cited a figure of $150,000 over 5 years per square mile. But this was a figure I considered at least 40% too high back then and the CEO of Tropos Networks said they put their costs at around $100,000/square mile over 5 years.

So by that chicken scratch the core infrastructure setup and maintenance is about $20,000 per square mile per year, but then bandwidth costs scale according to usage (at fractions of a cent per GB).

Basically, for 2.1 million I'd be looking for them to be setting up the infrastructure for a small city to have wifi everywhere.

You can read about a lot of different efforts at municipal wifi here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network

Huh.

It sounds like they could have done much more with much less -- and I mean socially too (reaching more people, especially the working poor who typically live near housing projects). And that alone gives the PR factor of the experiment a big boost.

You really have to wonder why they chose the course they did.....

I am surprised when people do something right, not when they do something wrong. After all, there are often a lot more ways to do it wrong than to do it right.

And this way is stereotypically American. Have a problem with an entrenched industry gouging their way out of reach of your poor? Then by all means, tax those who aren't poor and pay those fine captains of industry their fair rates. Force the middle to pay the top to gouge the bottom.

Just like the healthcare "fix", just throw more money at the unhealthy industry instead of introducing more competition to the industry. The fix just adds to the problem.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised when people do anything like this simply because it requires long term thinking.

I'm been doing a lot of reading on the "poverty gap" and how it effects education and how that effects outcomes for children. Programs like this aren't going to be a quick fix but they do serve to even things up just a little between the rich and the poor.



I started watching "WalMart: The High Cost of Low Prices" this morning and it is exactly about what you're saying here.

I'm still confused re my options. If anyone has the patience to give me a clue, I'd be grateful.

I have a landline phone with a dsl modem/connection. This costs me an arm and a leg, approximating seventy dollars a month for the phone and dsl combo.
The phone charges are the largest part of that.
I have a mac desktop with an airport card.
I have no wireless hot spots near me and expect there won't be any time soon. Or maybe I don't understand how far away they can be...
I have a sprint cell phone with a low pay contract (about $13.00 a month)
A link butrflynet gave me to a local wifi/dsl/dial up firm shows to get my own wifi (if a tower available, which I'm assuming) would be be 395.00 plus $60. a month, for the slower capability.
So, if I sprung for my own wifi, and activated my airport card (whatever that takes) I'd save approx. $10. a month. Ugh, not enough.

So, if I got a somewhat smart phone - through, say Sprint -
http://now.sprint.com/nownetwork/mifiProductPage.html?ECID=SEM:Google:R:Sprint:Mobile:Broadband
I'm confused what all this means re features described like this (see below for reference):

The one shown immediately on that site is currently not supported in my zip code, but many other phones that are free with contract are supported in my zip code - or so it seems. (87120 is the zip)

What I want is to be able to connect to the internet - to web browse and post on, say, a2k, with qwerty, and email. I probably would want mobile hot spot available (not clear on that) - but sounds like it.
No interest in camera, music, gps system, voice activated dialing, bluetooth.

If I read these descriptions right, I'm still out of luck with one of these phones because of no nearby free mobile hot spot.
I fibbed a bit, the local library (to me fairly far) is a possibility as it is listed as a free hot spot -
Does that mean I need to use their computers for however short a time, or does it mean that I could use my own smart phone near the library?
If I can use that wifi, how close to the library must I be?
If I can use it, is that 24/7 or only in library hours?


Just for reference re the terms I was mentioning -
Sprint 3G/4G USB U600
Access to 4G speeds that are up to 10x faster than 3G
Dual-mode 3G/4G device, access to dependable 3G speeds and accelerated 4G speeds where available
3G speeds where available
GPS Navigation enabled
Web browsing capable
Email capable (no apparent keyboard)

LG Remarq™
Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
Music capable
Web browsing capable
Email capable
Camera
Bluetooth® Wireless

SCP-2700 by SANYO®
GPS Navigation enabled
Web browsing capable
Email capable
Camera
Bluetooth® Wireless
Voice activated dialing

Overdrive™ 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot by Sierra Wireless
Access to 4G speeds that are up to 10x faster than 3G
Dual-mode 3G/4G device, access to dependable 3G speeds and accelerated 4G speeds where available
3G speeds where available
Mobile hotspot
GPS Navigation enabled
Web browsing capable
(This one's not free but I add it to show the "Mobile hotspot" bit.

Samsung Epic™ 4G
Access to 4G speeds that are up to 10x faster than 3G
Dual-mode 3G/4G device, access to dependable 3G speeds and accelerated 4G speeds where available
Dual cameras
1 GHz processor
Mobile Hotspot capable
3G speeds where available

You obviously don't follow the credit markets - street lights are getting turned off to stave off looming municipal and state bankruptcies:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2010/12/municipal-default-crisis-on-the-horizon.html

I read this twice and still don't get it - as I also don't get how the criticism heaped on you for walking into WalMart would have been any more virulent if you had started with "Then when I go into Bergdorf Goodman...". You seem to have run head-on into the local PC police