

$10 billion takes fiber to every school, hospital in the US - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/gates-foundation-hopes-to-bring-fiber-to-school-hospitals.ars

======
coffeemug
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
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.

------
enneff
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
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
I made a similar rant: [http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-
availa...](http://creativedeletion.com/2008/11/05/wifi-in-sydney-available-
but-sparse-expensive-restricted/)

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
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.

------
garyrichardson
I'm sure you can find some of those billions in here:

<http://it.usaspending.gov/>

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

------
jksmith
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.

