4 ms·

$10 billion takes fiber to every school, hospital in the US

12 points by abraham 17y ago

jksmith 17y ago
And we'll still have to fill out new paperwork at every endpoint we visit along the way. This is some kind of steampunk conspiracy going on.
garyrichardson 17y ago
I'm sure you can find some of those billions in here: http://it.usaspending.gov/ http://it.usaspending.gov/
enneff 17y ago
This is a really great idea. In Australia we have these frustrating issues with infrastructure deployment. Currently they're planning to roll out fibre to every home (or every street or 'node' - there's debate about the approach). If we just got all municipal buildings wired with a fibre uplink of a gigabit (with room to expand), that would be an excellent start.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  I've been in Australia and New Zealand for the last 4 weeks or so, and so far the internet experience hasn't been that good compared to the states. Perhaps it's just the hotels, but everywhere we've been so far has been very, very stingy with connect time and bandwidth compared to the U.S. For instance, I'm paying $35NZ today. According to the TOS, that is for 24 hours of internet usage that might include up to 100MB, if they determine I'm acting "fairly" with my connection. It's freaking highway robbery is what it is. Here's hoping you guys get that fiber. (sorry, just had to get that rant out on the net somewhere!)
  - laut 17y ago
    I made a similar rant: http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-available-but-sparse-expensive-restricted/ http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-availa... I was in Sydney but went to the Philippines earlier than planned because I couldn't get internet access in Sydney without paying crazy amounts of money for internet by the hour (or 15 minutes etc.)! And as a "westerner" being in the aussie/kiwi timezones, sometimes you might want to be online when the cafés that have internet are closed. NZ was similar. In Australia they had a TV commercial advertising how much 2GB traffic a month was. Surreal. Traffic seemed in very short supply. I've been used to unlimited traffic (only limited by speed) via DSL for maybe a decade. In my experience in Asia, South America and Scandinavia internet via wifi is available many places in hotels and/or cafés, bars etc. without having to pay extra. In Tokyo you want to use ethernet because wifi would limit the bandwidth :-)
    - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
      It's really impressed on me the degree that the U.S. is interconnected. For instance, when ordering a pizza, I went online looking for shops. Wrong answer. Shops were found in the yellow pages. Only in Sydney did I see online ordering available, and it was from an American Company (Pizza Hut) In New Zealand in some places if you want internet you pay for it in 15-minute/5MB increments! Holy restricted-internet, Batman. Because of that, the things we take for granted back in the states are a major pain here. For instance, we're using FlipCams on our vacation, creating movies to upload. But forget about uploading movies over 100MB unless you want to pay lots of money. We have Carbonite to backup our hard drives while we do other things -- but that can be heavily bandwidth intensive as well. On Saturday nights I like to use video chatrooms, but forget about that too. Without knowing it, we're easily consuming hundreds of MB (and perhaps more) back in the states. I have satellite at home and regularly complain about the restrictions on it. It just goes to show that until everybody gets fiber to the NIC, we're still going to be sucking wind as far as the possibilities for applications go. Disclaimer: I only have a very limited experience, so I might be way off-base in my analysis.
coffeemug 17y ago
I really appreciate innovation, technology, and the power of technology to transform our quality of life, but I don't support the push to bring latest and greatest technology to schools as a first priority. Education has much more important problems that need to be fixed first. When I was in high school, the school decided to replace old DOS machines that ran Borland compilers with Visual Studio. I bet on paper it sounded like a great idea (teach kids newer technology), except no more than three or four kids out of the entire school of five thousand were capable of mastering simple, linear DOS programs. The rest of the kids just vandalized the machines. Spending all that money on brand new Pentiums with Windows didn't advance the quality of education one bit. Spending it on teachers that can actually be engaging, requiring higher standards, involving parents, and bringing in a little bit of discipline would have done a lot more for less. Getting broadband to every school is great, once we fix more pressing problems. Broadband on its own will just give most kids a better youtube connection.
- hussong 17y ago
  I agree. In Germany, we had an initiative called "Schulen ans Netz" (get schools online). It was all about uplink, neglecting the boxes and, above all, teaching resources. As one of my professors put it: "What are you going to do when all the schools are online? Take the first one offline again?". On a side note, at the time the university was online of course (now they even have wifi), but there was no chalk in the (often overcrowded) seminar rooms and it was hard to get an OH projector or even a beamer for presentations.
marknutter 17y ago
I hope some of that money is going for extra toilets.

12 points by abraham 17y ago

And we'll still have to fill out new paperwork at every endpoint we visit along the way. This is some kind of steampunk conspiracy going on.

garyrichardson 17y ago

I'm sure you can find some of those billions in here: http://it.usaspending.gov/ http://it.usaspending.gov/

enneff 17y ago

This is a really great idea. In Australia we have these frustrating issues with infrastructure deployment. Currently they're planning to roll out fibre to every home (or every street or 'node' - there's debate about the approach). If we just got all municipal buildings wired with a fibre uplink of a gigabit (with room to expand), that would be an excellent start.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
I've been in Australia and New Zealand for the last 4 weeks or so, and so far the internet experience hasn't been that good compared to the states. Perhaps it's just the hotels, but everywhere we've been so far has been very, very stingy with connect time and bandwidth compared to the U.S. For instance, I'm paying $35NZ today. According to the TOS, that is for 24 hours of internet usage that might include up to 100MB, if they determine I'm acting "fairly" with my connection. It's freaking highway robbery is what it is. Here's hoping you guys get that fiber. (sorry, just had to get that rant out on the net somewhere!)
- laut 17y ago
  I made a similar rant: http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-available-but-sparse-expensive-restricted/ http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-availa... I was in Sydney but went to the Philippines earlier than planned because I couldn't get internet access in Sydney without paying crazy amounts of money for internet by the hour (or 15 minutes etc.)! And as a "westerner" being in the aussie/kiwi timezones, sometimes you might want to be online when the cafés that have internet are closed. NZ was similar. In Australia they had a TV commercial advertising how much 2GB traffic a month was. Surreal. Traffic seemed in very short supply. I've been used to unlimited traffic (only limited by speed) via DSL for maybe a decade. In my experience in Asia, South America and Scandinavia internet via wifi is available many places in hotels and/or cafés, bars etc. without having to pay extra. In Tokyo you want to use ethernet because wifi would limit the bandwidth :-)
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    It's really impressed on me the degree that the U.S. is interconnected. For instance, when ordering a pizza, I went online looking for shops. Wrong answer. Shops were found in the yellow pages. Only in Sydney did I see online ordering available, and it was from an American Company (Pizza Hut) In New Zealand in some places if you want internet you pay for it in 15-minute/5MB increments! Holy restricted-internet, Batman. Because of that, the things we take for granted back in the states are a major pain here. For instance, we're using FlipCams on our vacation, creating movies to upload. But forget about uploading movies over 100MB unless you want to pay lots of money. We have Carbonite to backup our hard drives while we do other things -- but that can be heavily bandwidth intensive as well. On Saturday nights I like to use video chatrooms, but forget about that too. Without knowing it, we're easily consuming hundreds of MB (and perhaps more) back in the states. I have satellite at home and regularly complain about the restrictions on it. It just goes to show that until everybody gets fiber to the NIC, we're still going to be sucking wind as far as the possibilities for applications go. Disclaimer: I only have a very limited experience, so I might be way off-base in my analysis.

coffeemug 17y ago

I really appreciate innovation, technology, and the power of technology to transform our quality of life, but I don't support the push to bring latest and greatest technology to schools as a first priority. Education has much more important problems that need to be fixed first. When I was in high school, the school decided to replace old DOS machines that ran Borland compilers with Visual Studio. I bet on paper it sounded like a great idea (teach kids newer technology), except no more than three or four kids out of the entire school of five thousand were capable of mastering simple, linear DOS programs. The rest of the kids just vandalized the machines. Spending all that money on brand new Pentiums with Windows didn't advance the quality of education one bit. Spending it on teachers that can actually be engaging, requiring higher standards, involving parents, and bringing in a little bit of discipline would have done a lot more for less. Getting broadband to every school is great, once we fix more pressing problems. Broadband on its own will just give most kids a better youtube connection.

hussong 17y ago
I agree. In Germany, we had an initiative called "Schulen ans Netz" (get schools online). It was all about uplink, neglecting the boxes and, above all, teaching resources. As one of my professors put it: "What are you going to do when all the schools are online? Take the first one offline again?". On a side note, at the time the university was online of course (now they even have wifi), but there was no chalk in the (often overcrowded) seminar rooms and it was hard to get an OH projector or even a beamer for presentations.

marknutter 17y ago

I hope some of that money is going for extra toilets.