Right on the heels of my recent post about building city-wide wireless networks, Robert X. Cringely has a article at pbs.com entitled Land Grab where he describes how Wal-Mart, or any other similarly gigantic nation-wide retail outfit, could use its locations to install WiMax hotspots that would cover 1,000 square miles each. An interesting idea to be sure, and anyone who saw Frontlline’s recent show Is Wal-Mart Good For America would know that Wal-Mart has an insatiable appetite for new technology. Cringely may be on to something here.
Category Archives: IT Infrastructure
City-wide wireless
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.
Dial-up doesn’t cut it anymore
The most recent survey of students in our school district indicated that nearly 90% of them had computers in their homes and the vast majority of those had connections to the Internet. Unfortunately, I don’t think that information tells the whole story. If we’re really concerned about the digital divide and providing an equitable education for all students then we need to be asking about the speed of their Internet connections.
I moved into a new house about a year and a half ago and had to go without my high-speed Internet connection for several weeks. It was painful to say the least. Are students using dial-up really on equal technological footing with students who access the Internet at speeds that support a full multimedia experience? I don’t think so. The latest figures I can find show that about 50% of Americans with Internet access use high-speed connections. That leaves millions of students who have either no connection at all or one that allows only basic Internet use. Maybe WiMAX will be the answer. At the very least, let’s change the questions on those student surveys so we get good information about what our students can and can’t do with technology at home.