Interesting People mailing list archives
IP: The story still has legs...
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 08:17:29 -0500
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> [Note: This item comes from reader Tim Pozar. DLH] At 21:47 -0800 11/15/01, Tim Pozar wrote:From: Tim Pozar <pozar () lns com> To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Subject: The story still has legs... Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 21:47:51 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0 There is an article going up in the NY Times soon too... Tim -- <http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-000091346nov15.story> Cutting the CordActivists are crafting a vision of high-speed Net access, one free of wires and monthly charges.Dave Wilson November 15 2001 MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- It's around noon on a busy Friday when Rick Potts, a software engineer at Netscape Communications Corp., walks into the Dana Street Roasting Co. and gently sets his laptop computer on a table near the front door. He turns it on and quickly links to a wireless high-speed Internet connection. There are a lot of coffee bars in the Silicon Valley that let you do this sort of thing, but Dana Street is different. Here the connection is free, courtesy of a computer sitting benignly underneath a sink behind the counter. "I just like to come here and work sometimes," Potts said. "I enjoy the flexibility. It makes for a nice work experience." In addition to work, he can check in with friends, see what's playing at the movies and make a dinner reservation. Potts and hundreds of others have used the Dana Street wireless Internet pipe in the months since local technology entrepreneur Ross Finlayson installed it so he could use the coffee shop as a second office. "I basically set it up as a convenience for me," he said. "But it turns out lots of other people find it convenient too." Finlayson, and thousands like him all over the world, are crafting a new vision of Internet access, a cooperative, community-based endeavor that provides wireless high-speed bandwidth, eliminating monthly fees charged by telephone and cable companies. These activists are cobbling together systems in garages and attics, taking the wired high-speed connections that come into their homes and throwing them open to neighbors. This utopian vision of free, high-speed access, any time and anywhere, is rooted in the earliest days of the Internet, when colleges and universities freely pooled computing resources and made them available to anyone connected to the system. "We are putting these things out there and creating communities," said Tim Pozar, a San Francisco telecommunications engineer who is at the forefront of the movement in the Bay Area. Pozar, 43, helped create one of the earliest Internet service providers a decade ago by stringing cables through San Francisco neighborhoods. People didn't see the importance of Internet access until they had it, and once they had it, they wanted more. He sees providing cutting-edge technology to people who otherwise would not have access as a moral imperative. [...]
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- IP: The story still has legs... David Farber (Nov 16)