Monday, November 26, 2012; 11:33:42 AM Eastern
Bandwidth poverty
- Yesterday I wrote a piece about information poverty from one point of view, but there's another -- bandwidth.
- In New York, the largest city in the US, the bandwidth available to most residents is pitiful for 2012. There is some FIOS, but very little, and mostly in the outer boroughs. In Manhattan we get Time-Warner asymetric junk.
- Google is of course experimenting with gigabit fiber in Kansas City,
and now they've bought a wifi service company. Ooops, turns out that was a hoax! :-( - The short term solution to New York's connectivity problem isn't digging up the streets and laying fiber, it's wifi hotspots blanketing the city. Every cell phone, laptop and desktop computer comes with wifi today, world wide. It's the standard for the future. And you can get some pretty great throughput with wifi. Much better than the crap that cable companies offer today. And much much cheaper.
- Google is probably going to price it at $0. :-)
- I've long argued that the NY Times should solve the city's bandwidth problem and charge us a reasonable price for it. The window of opportunity for that may be closing pretty quickly