San Francisco’s digital pariahs

In their noble pursuit of a digitally inclusive city-wide network, EarthLink and San Francisco have concocted an abominably silly scheme: providing a 300kbps “low end” service tier at no charge. The idea is that EarthLink will be able to subsidize the cost of serving low-income areas (one of the City’s design requirements) with income generated from higher-end paying subscribers.

But what is the social benefit of providing a 300kbps service?  What can anyone do with 300kbps in today’s world?

Not much: try using it for email (good luck with that 3 meg attachment from aunt Margie), streaming video (distance learning? telemedicine?), Skype (forget cheap long distance). And the list goes on. Using 300 kbps in 2007 is akin to buying a PC with 256 kbytes of RAM and a 20 megabyte hard disk: no matter how desperately low you are in the social totem pole, there really is little use for one. 

We are not sure why the City and Earthlink have come up with this brain-dead “low-tier” gimmick. A more reasonable approach would have been to identify those who are truly in need, and provide a subsidized 1-2 mbps service to them. Does the idea seem difficult to implement? It is not. There are solutions available that make it possible.

6:52:46 PM