How one of the poorest districts in the US pipes Wi-Fi to families – using school buses America's second-poorest school district is also home to a surprising IT program that has won it national acclaim. The Coachella Valley Unified School District, located east of Los Angeles in California's Riverside County, encompasses around 1,250 square miles of largely rural areas. It includes 20,000 students, most from hard …
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I live in the midwest in the U.S. and you won't get much for $120. My TV is more than that and I have no sports packages and only one movie package (Starz.) Combined, my internet/phone/TV is just under double your estimate, about $225.
You’ve got satellite?
I remember when I had to connect to the Internet via two tomato tins and a piece of string. Of course we couldn’t afford tomatoes in those days, so we had to substitute discarded paint tins which we found rummaging through the garbage tip. Of course being too poor to afford our own garbage tip, we had to travel for miles to the one in the next county. On foot. Bare feet, because we were so disadvantaged that we only had one pair of shoes which we saved for special occasions such as our own funerals. If you could afford a funeral at all, instead of just being dumped in the aforementioned garbage tip.
And don’t even talk about the string which had to be unraveled from old underwear which only only the upper echelon could afford …
Just kidding. Well done Coachella Valley for having the will to do good with an otherwise idle resource.
As I understand it, these 97 buses are meant to (eventually) provide proper broadband in the 20,000 student region. The mentioned cost is a quarter million. Say 10 bucks per student served. That cost doesn't include the buses themselves; that's paid by the taxpayer. I assume that the router install base will suffer some 'shrinkage' over time. They are school buses after all.
Then there is the quality to be expected by the consumers, those students. I'm not up on the capabilities of the tech in this area, but I bet it won't be top notch, particularly when Pr0n River is in full flood. The article states an on-station rate of ten buses, which I assume is insufficient for the needs?
Given all that, I estimate that quarter mil is only a down-payment when all is said and done. Don't get me wrong, if there was ever a good rationale for taxation to benefit the poor, this is it. You can't avoid SOME positive effects on a population newly exposed to big pipes, right? Beats most other social spending anyway.
Still, one would welcome a proper breakdown of the real costs, government vs private sector, along with actual bandwidth delivered reliably.
> if there was ever a good rationale for taxation to benefit the poor, this is it. You can't avoid SOME positive effects on a population newly exposed to big pipes, right? Beats most other social spending anyway.
I can hear your teeth gritting from here on the other side of the pond...
I assume that the router install base will suffer some 'shrinkage' over time.
One of the positive aspects of community involvement is that vandalism tends to diminish. When local people, including the young ones, are directly involved in the way that their local environment looks and functions then to an extent it becomes self-policing.
"I assume that the router install base will suffer some 'shrinkage' over time. They are school buses after all."
When "shrinkage" means "no network", you can guarantee that the culprit will have a group of students lighting a barbeque on his front lawn and adding him (invariably "him") to the grill.
You should know that if you compare it to something outside itself, the USA doesn't HAVE "leftist" areas. It's all more or less right-wing. Even "extreme right". The whole country is basically one large mass of corporatist politicians and bureaucrats. What you call "left" in that country is still what most other countries would call "corporatist" or even "fascist". With all the symptoms of such governance including a larger and larger divide between an ever decreasing class of "those who have", and an ever increasing class of "everyone else who doesn't have" as the country slowly (although rather quickly in a historical context) implodes after having scuttled its democracy in the late 40's, early 50's in favour of a fundamentalist corporate state.
The poor don't tend to care much if an empire falls, because when it does they usually don't have anything to lose anyway. Or as a friend used to say: "eat the rich, because the poor are tough and stringy".
No, I'm saying you have zero reading comprehension, and are probably a product of they fairly typical American educational system, such as it is.
The USA doesn't have a "left" except as a fringe group. What so many Americans call "left" is actually very right wing, but because they haven't got a clue as to what an actual "left" looks like, they keep mistaking theirs for one. Other countries do have a "left" and a "right". The USA just has "right" and "far right". Very unbalanced. Even unhinged.
For Politicians even at state level, is does not really exist.
There are some really remote parts of the country.
There is a road going from Nevada into Oregon that has a sign saying
Lakeview 179 miles
200yds down the road there is another one
Next Gas 179.
Turn around and it is 82miles to 'Gas'. Wonderful and beautiful country but a long way from nowhere.
So being serious for a moment, what company would invest in anything but wet string to provide internet out there?
This area of California is pretty remote and the small population widely scattered. Income? Mostly Benefits. There was work once but the mines closed a long time ago. Not a lot left out there. So unless you are going to make the citizens move... you are stuck. The 19th Centurty ideal of having their own claim/homestead and living on it remains true today.
this solution deserves a lot of kudos. Well done.
So this, I asume totallty cash strapped, local administration decided to spaff a load of dosh on some tablets.
And then found that there was no connetivity.
So spaffed some more on wifi for the buses so the kids can connect on the way to school.
Which would, in a sparsely populated area, give superb continuous wideband coverage ...
After all, there's no one else out there to use all that bandwidth, is there?
Etc, etc.
Do I smell a huge porkfest somewhere?
How many decent books would the spiralling costs of this have provided?
Sorry, but I'm just not convinced.
We desperately need more stuff like this - creative solutions to real-[admittedly first]-world problems. I work in the financial sector and frequently despair of the overblown, overcomplicated and ridiculously expensive solutions that "The Business" come up with for trivial problems.
Somewhere along the lines, we seem to have convinced ourselves as a society that the right solution for any problem has to involve big shiny technology. As a consequence, solving problems creatively seems to be becoming a lost art. Kudos for the people who came up with this :).
I thought that too at first, but the original idea was to give kids on the bus for two hours a way to do "homework," and not have wasted the time. The revelation to the plan is that when the bus goes off-duty it's parked in an area with lots of people to allow those folks access.
How do they get a mobile data plan that permits zillions of GB per month?
Such an approach is literally impossible in Canada. Hundreds of kids sharing one 'free' LTE account would result in somebody getting The Largest Invoice In History. The bill would be in the many millions of dollars.
If this is all explicable and affordable, then the entire 'last mile' issue is solved (!!!). Just use affordable and unlimited LTE.
When we used Mobile Data to be our ISP, it was limited to 5 GB per month. $100/month, and extremely limited use.
I know the idea of actually reading the article before commenting is shocking....
To address the issue, the district looked at a valuable resource it already had: school buses equipped with LTE antennas and Wi-Fi hotspots were already able to provide access to students on their daily commutes.
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