Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrgifford | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see if they can do this better than previous attempts. I remember in 2009 when OneCommunity tried[1], 2014 when OneCommunity launched everstream, their for-profit arm (and didn't change much)[2], or the 2018 Old Brooklyn/Ward 13 project[3].

Somewhere in there, there was an initiative (probably 2009 or so?) that included public wifi in Cleveland Heights along much of Cedar Road, where One Community had a wifi SSID "OneCommunityPublic" (or something similar). That got shut down quickly.

[1] https://www.cleveland.com/business/2009/07/onecommunity_seek...

[2] https://everstream.net/press-releases/onecommunity-launches-...

[3] https://connectyourcommunity.org/cdjc-program-four-points/fr...

View on HN

My buddy was at Case Western back in 2007/8ish and worked on that One Community project. He called it 'porn for the poor'.

There were all these utopian ideas getting floated about how revolutionary the idea was and that basically lack of high speed internet access was the only thing keeping all these people in poverty.

If we just gave the poor fast internet access as a public service then they would all learn to code, get remote jobs, and raise themselves out of poverty.

Months into the experiment they discovered that no one used the free job training features that came with the internet access and instead they were just using it for porn and piracy.

Maybe puritans would have objected to the poor using the internet to get their rocks off in 2007. However, in 2023 - I cannot imagine anyone applying for a job without using the internet in some fashion. Could one discover job openings in a newspaper and mail their resume by post and wait for a phone call? Perhaps, but even McJobs have QR codes now.

I have no doubt that anyone in the US who doesn't have internet access is severely disadvantaged on the job market (or even accessing Khan academy). Yes, they may use most of the bandwidth for entertainment,but gatekeeping what poor people should do with their resources seems a tad paternalistic, this includes policing what should be in the shopping baskets of SNAP beneficiaries.

> There were all these utopian ideas getting floated

Funny how the sales pitch and reality collide, eh?

The sad part is that stupid sales pitches like that are required to get movement. Internet access is 21st century dial tone, the vast majority of people need it to function in normal society. Universal Service was the sort of socialism a fast-growing capitalist society needed; internet service is the same now.

People seem to think of it as a luxury. They're wrong: it is a control mechanism that comes with access to videos of naked people. To the extent you want the machinery of society to keep working, you should want everyone attached, including those smut-loving poor people you seem to want to judge.

I remember that and did contact Everstream for internet service. It was 1000/1000, but they wanted $500 for running the lines from across the street and then $500 per month after that. Insane.

$500 for running the lines under a street isn't too far out of the ordinary (I paid $300 for a longer run, but there was nothing to go under, so the job was easy).

That said, $500/month for service is insane.

That sounds like pricing for a "business-class" Dedicated Internet Access service, with meaningful SLAs and no oversubscription.

There's actually an existing initiative that provides cheap wireless across parts of lower income areas run by PCs for people and pretty large nonprofit. So there's definitely hope with expansion from wireless to fiber I think.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com