MESSAGE
| DATE | 2017-02-06 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
|
| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] what is important in the digital divide
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I took a trip this weekend and collected magazine to read including the
MIT review when i ran across this article. We've worked these issues
before so this article is of interest and I'd like to talk about this
and send a rational feedback from NYLXS
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603083/the-unacceptable-persistence-of-the-digital-divide/
The Unacceptable Persistence of the Digital Divide
Millions of Americans lack broadband access and computer skills. Can
President Trump bring them into the digital economy?
by David Talbot December 16, 2016
Most homes in the United States have Internet service, but they don’t in
the poor parts of Cleveland and nearby suburbs. A survey in 2012 showed
that 58 percent of the area’s households with incomes under $20,000 had
neither home broadband nor mobile Internet access, often because of the
cost. Another 10 percent had a mobile phone but no home broadband. Until
recently, one such household was a ground-floor two-bedroom apartment
in a public housing project called Outhwaite Homes, where a circumspect
13-year-old girl named Ma’Niyah Larry lives with her mother, Marcella.
Ma’Niyah has a special-education plan for math; to help her, she’s been
assigned problems to do online through Khan Academy. But her mother says
she cannot afford broadband from Time Warner Cable, which would begin at
around $50 a month, even for an entry-level offering, plus modem and
taxes (and the price would rise significantly after the 12-month teaser
rate expired). The family has a smartphone, but it’s harder for Ma’Niyah
to use the small screen, and Marcella watches her data caps closely;
just a few hours of Khan Academy videos would blow past monthly limits.
Fast Internet access is available in a library a few blocks away, but
“it’s so bad down here that it’s not really safe to walk outside,”
Marcella Larry says. Ma’Niyah’s bedroom, its wall decorated with a
feathery dream-catcher, faces a grassy courtyard where gang-related
gunfire rang out on two nights last summer, causing Ma’Niyah to flee to
the relative safety of the living room.
There is a patchwork of attempts to deal with this problem. The region’s
public housing agency, the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority,
recently gave Ma’Niyah a tablet and a wireless hotspot in a trial
program to help close the “homework gap” that’s opened up between kids
who have Internet-connected computers at home and those who don’t. And
Marcella Larry qualifies for a discount program AT&T offers to families
that receive food subsidies: DSL service—far slower than what the
government defines as broadband—over phone lines for $5 to $10 a month.
But it’s hardly a long-term solution. AT&T agreed to offer the package
for four years as part of its effort to win regulatory approval for its
acquisition of DirectTV.
This story is part of our January/February 2017 Issue
See the rest of the issue
Subscribe
What is the best way to end the digital divide?
Tell us what you think.
Marcella and Ma’Niyah are among the millions of people on the wrong side
of America’s persistent digital divide. A survey by Pew Research shows
that fully one-third of American adults do not subscribe to any Internet
access faster than dial-up at their home at a time when many basic
tasks—finding job listings, doing homework, obtaining social services,
and even performing many jobs—require being online. Even many people who
are willing to pay for service can’t get it. Thirty-four million
Americans have no access at all to broadband as the U.S. Federal
Communications Commission defines it: a download speed of at least 25
megabits per second and an upload speed of three megabits per second.
These speeds are what FCC chairman Tom Wheeler calls “table stakes for
21st-century communications.”
People without broadband are not necessarily entirely offline: like
Marcella Larry, some of them rely on smartphones. But because of small
screens and data caps, phones are not an adequate substitute for home
broadband. Its absence in some communities is a growing problem at a
time when the jobs of the future will be increasingly digital: the
Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that 500,000 information technology
jobs will be created in the next few years. Already, one in 20 American
adults is deriving some income from online “gig” employment (not
including ride- or home-sharing services), according to joint studies by
Microsoft Research and the Pew Research Center. Such opportunities are
only expected to grow—for people who have broadband access.
In Cleveland, which along with Detroit ranks among the worst-connected
cities in the nation, help is on the way for some residents. Housing
projects like the one where Marcella and Ma’Niyah Larry live are about
to benefit from an ambitious project to provide the fastest service in
the city using a combination of fiber-optic networks and a new breed of
wireless connection. But no comprehensive solution is in evidence for
these cities—or the nation as a whole. Despite having invented the
Internet’s protocols, the United States lags far behind much of the
industrialized world in available broadband speeds and affordability of
fast services—a problem that is particularly acute in inner cities and
rural areas. In past eras, great national efforts led to universal
electricity and telephone service. Now the nation could use an ambitious
plan to improve service, drive down costs, and expand access to children
like Ma’Niyah and everyone else who deserves it.
Opening doors
Of course, computers and broadband by themselves don’t magically lead to
college degrees and better jobs. After all, much of what people do with
Internet access once they get it is hardly productive. But some of them
may not be getting the training they need to make effective use of
software and online services. And there are many correlations between
broadband access and income levels or success in finding employment. As
the White House Council of Economic Advisers says, “The digital divide
is likely both a cause and a consequence of other demographic disparities.”
When people do get broadband and computer training, their lives can
change in remarkable ways. Take Monica Moore. She’s a single mother who
lived in a decaying neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland and spent
more than 20 years working as a file clerk at the Cleveland Clinic. Then
three years ago came ominous news. “At work, they said everything was
going to electronic medical records and they were going to outsource my
job,” Moore, now 47, recalls. “Oh my gosh, my job.”
Moore had few computer skills and rarely used the Internet. The high
cost of service from Time Warner Cable kept her offline. But faced with
the prospect of losing her job, she steeled herself and entered a
storefront training center called the Ashbury Community Center. She
started learning software like Office and Excel, and wound up taking
online classes through the University of Phoenix. She spent evening
after evening doing that work until, in early 2016, she collected a
bachelor’s degree in finance. She was one of more than 6,000 people who
have received computer training over the past five years thanks to the
Ashbury Center and its partners in a nonprofit collaborative called
Connect Your Community.
Today, she’s still at the Cleveland Clinic—only she’s got a new job that
pays $20,000 more than her old one, editing and uploading digital
reports in the hospital’s bustling cardiac catheterization lab. “I was
stuck 20 years in the same job due to the fact I didn’t have the means,
the technology,” Moore says. “This opened so many doors for me, and I’m
just so thankful.” While finishing her degree, she recognized the value
of getting Internet access at home. She decided it was worth $154 a
month for a cable deal that includes high-speed access in her new home
in the suburb of South Euclid.
Fast and cheap
To solve the access problem for more low-income people, Cleveland needs
to focus on public or subsidized housing, where 50,000 of the city’s
375,000 inhabitants live. I took a trip to the 14th-story roof of a
public housing project named Cedar Estates with Lev Gonick, CEO of a
local nonprofit called DigitalC. We stepped out into the drizzle and
beheld a panoramic view of America’s industrial rise and decline. To the
north was Terminal Tower, a symbol of the region’s onetime economic
might: the 52-story Art Deco tower was once the second-tallest building
in America. To the south, smoke rose from two steel mills that represent
the vestiges of a local industry that today employs fewer than 2,000
people, down from Cleveland’s steelmaking peak of 47,000. Also in sight:
vacant factories and blocks of near-worthless frame houses.
Gonick pointed to St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, one kilometer away. A
high-speed fiber-optic network passes through St. Vincent’s; built using
a 2009 federal stimulus grant, it connects institutions including at
least 800 schools, medical facilities, and government buildings in
greater Cleveland. Now the plan is to extend the network to residents in
the housing projects. Because it would cost $350,000 to run fiber from
St. Vincent’s to Cedar Estates and several nearby buildings, DigitalC
will instead close that gap with a wireless technology costing one-tenth
as much to install: a millimeter-wave transmission system from a company
called Siklu. The new service will be able to deliver
one-gigabit-per-second connections to the building, and a bank of
servers in Cedar Estates’ basement telephone room will use the existing
copper telephone network to provide broadband service to all 163 apartments.
The goal: to provide the fastest and cheapest service in the city,
completely removing the cost barrier that poor residents now face.
Gonick believes the whole project is so cheap to build that when you
throw in an FCC subsidy (called “lifeline”) of $9.25 per month, all
tenants in the housing project will easily be able to afford broadband.
While delivering fast, cheap service is an end in itself, DigitalC and
partners also plan to give all tenants in the Cuyahoga Metropolitan
Housing Authority refurbished computers and training similar to what’s
offered at Ashbury. The tenants will be directed to online workforce
training schools such as Career Online High School, too. At the same
time, the government of Cuyahoga County is working to put more services
online, including workforce training, benefits enrollment, and
potentially telemedicine appointments, says Scot Rourke, chief
transformation officer for the county. “We want to do more than manage
poverty,” he says. “If we have broadband, we can do more kinds of
education and training. We’ve got to get people into jobs that will give
them the wages to get out of poverty.”
Paths to such jobs exist for those who seek them. One of the new
businesses within Terminal Tower is WeCanCodeIt, a 12-week software
engineering boot camp for people with little experience in technology.
The program aims to equip them for jobs like building websites. One
student is Melissa Hughes, 40, who left her job as an HIV-testing
counselor in Philadelphia and is now unemployed in Cleveland. “In my
previous field there was not stability,” she says. “Adding coding skills
will give me more opportunity.”
New efforts to introduce kids to coding are taking root as well. At a
recent “hip-hop coding” seminar organized by several academic
institutions in a downtown office space, teachers and librarians
photographed themselves doing break-dance moves and then used Scratch,
the popular programming language and online community developed at MIT,
to design multimedia animations of their antics. Maria Trivisonno, a
librarian in the Cleveland suburb of Warrensville Heights, explained the
audience she had in mind: the kids who pour into the library after
school, looking for things to do. “We want to teach kids how to create
things online, not only how to find information,” she said between dance
moves. “If you can start kids young thinking about how to code, it will
help them as they get older.”
Don’t be scared
While Gonick’s project might provide a model for cheap broadband in
public housing and for educational efforts that might help people put it
to good use, there’s a bigger problem to crack: how can we get more and
cheaper digital infrastructure everywhere else in the country? The key
is to stimulate competition. For example, after Google began offering
broadband on fiber-optic lines in the Kansas City area in 2012, existing
providers increased the speed of their services by 86 percent over what
it had been a year prior—the largest increase in the country at the
time, according to Akamai Technologies.
But Cleveland has no such luck. It has only two companies providing
service—Time Warner Cable and AT&T—and the latter doesn’t compete very
strongly. AT&T doesn’t offer most of the city anything close to what the
FCC considers broadband, and some streets can still only get dial-up
service from the company.
The situation is perhaps worse in rural areas. Drive an hour east of
Cleveland and you reach the community of Andover, flanking the
Pennsylvania border. Much of the region has only slow DSL from
CenturyLink. “They claim it’s ‘high speed,’ but downloading things
literally takes minutes,” says Cindy Schwenk, a retiree who works part
time at the Andover Public Library. When she’s there, she can use Wi-Fi
to download things on her smartphone in just seconds because the
building, unlike residences in the area, has a fast connection from a
state library consortium. People sometimes sit in their cars outside the
building after hours to get online.
The Andover area relies economically on part-time residents who vacation
at nearby Pymatuning Lake. But other areas without such draws may get
left behind in an increasingly digital economy.
How can we jump-start competition in these places? One model is
emerging: let local governments find partners to build out the basic
fiber-optic infrastructure, or at least the empty conduit that can carry
fiber underground, and then let service providers compete for customers
over such networks (or pull fiber through the conduit, as the case may
be). That’s what a few cities are doing, including the aerospace mecca
of Huntsville, Alabama. In this case, what’s going on in Huntsville
isn’t rocket science. The city is building the basic fiber
infrastructure, known as “dark fiber”; Google will “light” the fiber and
provide the service. In Ammon, Idaho, the city built a fiber network and
let private service providers duke it out. Now customers can use a Web
interface to switch providers in a few seconds. No need for the
company-specific cable or optical networking boxes that are common in
homes across the country.
--
So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
http://www.mrbrklyn.com
DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive
http://www.coinhangout.com - coins!
http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Being so tracked is for FARM ANIMALS and and extermination camps,
but incompatible with living as a free human being. -RI Safir 2013
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