In the same way that we would like to be able to take our skateboard into town in the early hours of the morning when nothing is moving, no one is awake, and slip down that long and wide Main Street from west to east, we would like to be able to sit under any tree with our laptop, any tree, and ... wow!... connect!
Looks like that dream -- like the skateboard dream -- won't enter reality anytime soon. The police and the constables no longer doze off in the wee hours in this county.
And Wi-Fi? Well... that's a dream, too.
... The excited momentum has sputtered to a standstill, tripped up by unrealistic ambitions and technological glitches. The conclusion that such ventures would not be profitable led to sudden withdrawals by service providers like EarthLink, the Internet company that had effectively cornered the market on the efforts by the larger cities.
Now, community organizations worry about their prospects for helping poor neighborhoods get online.
Why?
... It became clear that dependable reception required more routers than initially predicted, which drastically raised the cost of building the networks. Marketing was also slow to begin, so paid subscribers did not sign up in the numbers that providers initially hoped, Mr. Phillis said. Prices for Internet service on the broader market also began dropping to a level that, while above what many poor people could afford, was below what municipal Wi-Fi providers were offering, so the companies had to lower their rates even further, making investment in infrastructure even more risky ...
