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School districts are sending WiFi-equipped buses to poor and rural neighborhoods
- saystupidthings 7y agoWhat the hell is a rural neighborhood
- yeetman21 7y agowhat a waste of my tax dollars
- TrueGeek 7y agoIn my districts the busses are running their normal route at lunch time and any students who need a meal can come get a sack lunch.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ydb 7y agoThis is a great idea!! We need to give these poor and low-income urban and rural students as much opportunity to "get connected" as we can. There are many thousands of gifted students out there whose potential is untapped, and I think this is a great opportunity to accelerate education and foster growth. This, too, would help with the learn-to-code movement (a skills gap that I consider essential to close). This could have far-reaching effects and do wonders to lift the next generation of poor out of poverty and into more lucrative white collar jobs.
- _bxg1 7y agoIt is a great idea, but it's also a testament to the sorry state of our nation's internet infrastructure caused by telecoms that are free both from competition and from being regulated as the essential utilities they are (the latter thanks to Ajit Pai's cronyist FCC).
- luckylion 7y agoMaybe you can find solace in the fact that Germany, which allegedly breathes engineering, suffers from much the same fate. The internet in the large cities is good (not great, but good), in the smaller cities it's a mixed bag, but largely okay, and in the rural parts it's usually a joke. It appears that it is not an issue that's unique to the US, but common in the "old" Western democracies. Friends tell me it's not much different in rural Spain and France.
- _bxg1 7y agoThat's surprising to me; I've always heard that it's better in Europe. It's possible that our definitions of "great", "good", "okay", and "a joke" are different. "Good" in the US is 50mbps. "Okay" is 20mbps. "A joke" often means there's no actual hard line, and you have to use a satellite-based ISP instead.
- luckylion 7y agoThose definitions work here as well. There's the occasional outlier where you'll get fiber for a competitive price, but 50mbps is usually what you'll be able to get in a large city. Next up is 16/2.4, which most Germans can get. In rural areas, it's 6 or 3mbps, but if you're unlucky, you can also be stuck on that speed in a major city. This has been getting somewhat better by cable providers getting in on the action, but they have their own sets of challenges, like CGNAT, shared bandwidth and generally problematic contracts & customer service.
- hocuspocus 7y agoRural Spain and France are a lot less dense than rural Germany though. There's really no excuse for the state of broadband and cell coverage in your country. I lived two years in Mitte in Berlin, and I couldn't even make a phone call from my place! To add insult to the injury the BMVI was just around the corner; billboards about Gigabit broadband by 2025 reminded me everyday the country is 10 years behind where it could afford to be.
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- nicoburns 7y agoSeems like it would be a better idea just to subsidise these homes with a regular wired connection...
- zrail 7y agoLots of areas are unable to get any sort of wired connection for any amount of money.
- nradov 7y agoMy parents live in a rural area just outside of Silicon Valley and there is no fiber, cable, or DSL Internet service available at any price. The only options are satellite and Verizon cellular.
- zrail 7y agoYep. That’s most of the country by land area. Someone I follow on twitter just started construction on a licensed wireless backhaul to his house. Took months to even get the time of day from the ISP and it’s costing thousands of dollars to install.
- nicoburns 7y agoAh, WiFi trucks make more sense in that case. I was assuming that wired connections were available, just not affordable.
- sidpatil 7y agoFrom what I understand, wired infrastructure is really expensive to roll out, due to all the property rights that need to be negotiated.
- sokoloff 7y agoI think expenditures such as these, aimed directly at enabling community members to be more equal in terms of their ability to participate in the modern world and give themself a hand up are fantastic. Bring more of these types of tax expenditures IMO.
- zrail 7y agoHear hear. We need a new rural electrification act that pushes fiber to every nook and cranny of the country.
- ghaff 7y agoThough unlike electricity, it's going to be increasingly practical to deliver decent internet speeds via cellular and satellite. So I'm not sure that pushing wired connections to every individual house is the best approach at this point.
- dillonmckay 7y agoNot with arbitrary limits on monthly data transfer amounts.
- rbanffy 7y agoThere is no better incentive than having to compete against subsidized fiber.
- unangst 7y agoWiFi is an essential utility in 2020. When we shut down schools for Covid19 and scaled up from 7 to 11 grade levels of students using Chromebooks at home that was a major struggle for some families. It’s apparent that a number of families -esp. those with younger kids (new Chromebook recipients) or free/reduced status live in a “digital desert”. Subsidized housing /trailer parks here don’t have WiFi. For many of these families paying rent and putting food on the table is a major struggle. Busses are a creative option but we don’t have a good “unlimited data” provider for hotspots. One hotspot loaned out had 130GB of use for the month. It was used for two students and 6 additional family members.
- OJFord 7y agoEven we on HN are using 'WiFi' like this now?
- RandomBacon 7y agoIs it 'E-mail' or 'email', or 'Internet' or 'internet'?
- sidpatil 7y ago> Is it 'E-mail' or 'email' https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html > or 'Internet' or 'internet'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_of_Internet
- OJFord 7y agoI don't care, I think that would be much more pedantic than drawing a distinction between [wW]i-?[fF]i and [iI]nternet access. (Other than for consistency: a publisher should have a style guide entry on it, but it doesn't bother me what they choose.)
- ghaff 7y agoBoth those examples are cases of what often tends to happen with new terms. They're capitalized and often hyphenated (rather than making up a new word). But over time, you end up with something like "Open Source Big Data products delivered over the Internet" which gets pretty silly or you have hyphens all over the place which look pretty ugly. Where I work, our style is to generally eliminate both whenever possible. I guess WiFi is properly Wi-Fi but hardly anyone uses that these days.
- vijaybritto 7y agoWhat happens to poor households where there is a single computer for like 3 kids
- taborj 7y agoWhere I live, the school district sent equipment home for kids to use if they didn't have anything else. They fully expect to not receive a certain percentage back.
- eternalban 7y agoHave you considered that maybe the implicit social planning idea here is "these folks really don't need to know about calculus"? All this reminds me of throwing babies and books on top of electrified floors in Brave New World ..
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yeetman21 7y agohonestly is there even any purpose in trying to help them? A majority of them don't even want to learn and could benefit more by just sending them meals (which the kids probably went to school for)
- danans 7y agoIt's not just individual households. There are whole school communities predominantly comprised of households like this. It's been challenging even for the IT departments of technologically advanced companies to adapt to a remote workforce, so schools serving poor communities face daunting obstacles to continuity of education at the moment. This problem is exacerbated by the existing digital divide. As an example, I serve on the technology volunteer committee of a public school at which less than 5% of children are technically classified as being in poverty, yet the school had to lend out computers to 20% of the students. The lending program was managed by our volunteer committee so the administration and teachers could focus on ramping up the distance learning program curriculum. So our school is one of the lucky ones. However, in the same area there are schools where 95% of the students are in poverty, and they have no volunteer committees to help solve these problems, therefore it is left to the already overstretched staff. Some of these schools actually have computers they could lend, but no community knowlege capital to draw upon to organize adapt to the situation.
- inetsee 7y agoWhen I read articles like this I wonder whether mesh networking (a la the One Laptop Per Child project) might help with improving the reach of WiFi in underserved areas? Could anyone with more knowledge of the topic explain why mesh networking seems to be a good idea that never succeeded?
- ausjke 7y agomesh network still cut wifi bandwidth over hops badly, after 2 or 3 hops you barely can do any streaming, though surfing is fine. taking bus to provide wifi is expensive, an outdoor wifi node solution will be much cheaper, all you need is someone willing to share his wifi to those kids, but that might violate EULA from ISPs(that your wifi can not be shared, even if it's not for profit)
- ck2 7y agothere's one that sits at the end of my street everyday only problem is they idle the engine all day, that's dumb
- bronco21016 7y agoWhile its certainly not ideal, what would you expect them to do? They rigged these things together as cheaply as possible to get them rolling out before the end of the school year. Would you like them to spend hundreds of thousands on batteries and solar or more efficient generators? Oh, and add weeks if not months to the roll out? I think it's a bit quick to be outraged by the bus idling all day. Give them a little time to find money and iterate.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoidling engine consumption is much lower than you'd think, even on a bus. It's part of the push towards more energy efficient transportation.
- umvi 7y agoA nice idea, but my experience working with poor kids has led me to believe lack of access to resources is not the biggest issue these kids face. The biggest issue is lack of good parents. My next door neighbor is 11 years old. He has basically dropped out of middle school. Even before covid-19 he was constantly truant. Now that school has moved to online, he doesn't attend at all. His math teacher e-mailed me (I had previously contacted her to get a copy of his curriculum) and asked if he had access to a computer and WiFi because he hadn't attended a single online Zoom session. I assured her he did as I could hear him playing Fortnite all hours of the night. He often comes over for snacks at 10 pm. I ask whether he's had dinner and he claims his mom doesn't make dinner until 12 or 1 am. I ask what time he goes to bed and he replies "7 or 8 am". I've tried to motivate him to do Khan Academy courses for rewards, but his mom always undermines me. For example, I promised to buy him a Dragonball Z game if he completed the 6th grade math module on exponents. Half-way through the course he announced his mom bought him the game and he lost all motivation to continue. Even money doesn't seem to have much effect unless there is something he currently wants to buy. This happens every time though - his mom doesn't encourage school at all. She can't help him because (I'm pretty sure) she dropped out herself. There's no dad in the picture, and any motivation I try to use to get him to learn stuff gets instantly gratified by his mom. So basically, we have this kid with an inverted sleep schedule who is years behind his peers, has access to everything he needs to be successful, except parents who care about his future, and thus he is on a trajectory to fail.
- smkellat 7y agoI need to bookmark this for the June county broadband task force meeting. A point was raised at the last meeting that building a WISP may be the least impractical step forward to fill coverage gaps. With our local government budgets being slashed beyond survivable levels right now any effort would have to be by private finance alone incrementally. Difficulty funding due to COVID-19 even minimal policing and fire services puts broadband at a lower priority in officials minds right now.
- grahamburger 7y agoI'd be happy to help with this in any way I can. I run startyourownisp.com, email in my profile.
- cosmodisk 7y agoThe Guardian had a very interesting series on literacy in the UK. There was a paragraph about a teacher,who asked each kid to bring one book from home. One girl brought an Argos catalog.When explained by the teacher that it's not a book,the girl told the teacher that this was the only one she could find at home. These kids have no chances if the parents are like this and most likely is the biggest hurdle as opposed to the lack ofWifi or any other issue.
- rodolphoarruda 7y agoIn my experience implementing online learning in higher education in Peru showed that for most poor families wi-fi time is gold, no matter the context/situation. Student would connect as soon as they get into campus and work on things for her mother, father, uncles etc. From banking to social services, to buying things that are not available in local stores (mostly gifts or kids' toys). Work is done for family in between classes when time permits. I'm not surprised that kids at any age do the same (at school or in a bus) elsewhere.
- dehrmann 7y agoSeeing this, along with another top-level comment that what kids really lack is good parents, approaches for what broadly looks like "poverty" need to be different in developed vs. developing countries. People are poor for different reasons.
- searchableguy 7y agoControversial opinion but I think stopping poor irresponsible people from becoming parents is a better solution because A. It requires less resources for the society. B. It is better for the kid to not exist than to end up with a miserable life. Crime statistics for poor dysfunctional households doesn't look good. C. Overpopulation is a problem. Even if you can feed 12 billion people, at what cost. And you can already feed that many. The problem is often political and societal (stopping food waste can solve global hunger). If someone can suggest a solution, I am all ears. D. Lower population will lead to better reforms and more attention or investment per kid. It will be easier to move forward policies and test things. Democracy won't be a bottleneck but will work for once.
- leetcrew 7y agothe end goal of "only good parents have children" is a good one, but there are a lot of issues with implementing this in the real world, especially if it involves directly intervening in human reproductive choices. > B. It is better for the kid to not exist than to end up with a miserable life. Crime statistics for poor dysfunctional households doesn't look good. this is more a philosophical position than an objective fact, but I am inclined to agree with you. that is, if you could be certain that someone would have a terrible life, it would be better for them not to be born. the problem is the error bar on your good life vs. bad life projection. while the odds might be pretty bad for the group, individuals born in bad circumstances can and do become wealthy, achieve success in their field, and/or end up living generally happy lives. > C. Overpopulation is a problem. Even if you can feed 12 billion people, at what cost. And you can already feed that many. The problem is often political and societal (stopping food waste can solve global hunger). If someone can suggest a solution, I am all ears. overpopulation is not really a problem in the developed world, where birthrates tend to be at or slightly below replacement. the real problem with this idea is who "poor irresponsible people" turn out to be in practice. I won't speak to "irresponsible", as I'm not sure what to use as a source, but minorities are disproportionately represented among the poor. it's hard to see how this wouldn't end up disproportionately preventing minority children from being born. there's also the question of how you would prevent these people from having children in the first place, without using some very dystopian methods.
- tibbydudeza 7y agoThe govt approached our three cellphone providers to zero rate all educational websites so that no data cost is incurred when using them. So why can't US providers not do this ???.
- chrstphrhrt 7y agoInternet access is a human right that flows from the right to education.