Absolutely Brilliant!
Giving super fast Internet connections to people who are probably too poor to pay their electric bills regularly, much less buy computers.
-Chris
The inventor of the Internet Wayback Machine is delivering free broadband net connections to San Francisco public housing projects, giving residents significantly faster access speeds than anyone else in the city. The Internet Archive - a San Francisco-based not-for-profit famous for recording internets past - has already …
Yeah, it's not always easy if, for whatever reason, one happens to end up at the bottom of the heap.
@John A Blackley
Certainly for off-peak use the marginal cost to ISPs wouldn't be great, and suitable PCs are often thrown away. The local server plus network setup and maintenance looks to be the most difficult bit, because it needs people who have or can learn the skills.
Something similar was tried in the UK almost a decade ago: (http://www.overmet.net/press/inside_housing/default.htm). I lost touch with the person who had been involved, but it would be interesting to know how the project progressed.
"City residents with, say, a Comcast cable connection are down at 6Mbps." Are you sure? Comcast network must be much better in Frisco than in DC then. I have friends there, and have used their Comcast cable connection. I missed a good old 56 k modem (leaving the phone line free is not even an advantage as their phone line is down most of the time anyway). Most of the time, the (Comcast-intalled) cable modem is not even able to get an IP for more than 1 hr in a row, and then needs hard reboot.
Sounds like the heinous redneck-style rants on how life is easier for the lazy indigent scum is getting closer and closer to reality! (My friends in DC both recently got macbooks pro though, I'm still waiting to see homeless people with these overpriced text processors. Maybe they'll soon get them from the nearest dump, given how secure the last papersheet-thin apple-branded toy recently proved to be...)