City-wide wireless
November 19th, 2004 | by Tim Wilson |A couple articles have surfaced in the last week or so about large scale wireless deployments in Seattle and Taipei. These cities may be on the cutting edge, but the wireless revolution is coming to a city or town near you within a few years.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer article, Speakeasy is planning a WiMAX system that will cover the downtown area using only four basestations with speeds up to 3 Mbps. WiMAX, which stands for Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access and carries the IEEE 802.16 label, has much greater range than the more common 802.11 systems. WiMAX is getting quite a lot of buzz these days as the up and coming standard that could finally put a wireless network cloud over huge areas.
The Taipei project will use already common 802.11 technology and will require an extensive network of 20,000 basestations. The Yahoo! News article reports the cost of the network will be $70M, but could be profitable in five years.
Whatever the technology, the important message for educators is that universal broadband is coming and we’d better get ready. One of the teachers in my district related a story to me recently about a lesson she was teaching. At one point during the lesson she asked her 4th grade students how fast they could answer two questions: who was the fourth president of the U.S., and how much does a blue whale weigh? The winning times thanks to Google and good keyboarding skills? Four seconds and seven seconds respectively. Do you think these kids relate to information differently than their parents and most of their teachers? Digital immigrant teachers beware, the digital natives aren’t waiting for you to catch up.
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