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A quick thing before I do a writing jog and go to the beach: broadband is a critical utility that should not be managed by giant, stupid, for-profit companies. It should be public, and it should be fast, and it should be cheap or free. I am ready to fight anyone about this.
Friday was the first day of school for my fifth-grader. She got a laptop from the school that's pretty good. We have fast broadband through CenturyLink because my wife has worked from home since we moved here. I thought everything would be fine on Friday. It was not.
The kid got dropped from her class Teams call twice. Both times she had to turn off her laptop's wifi to reconnect. People with more technical knowledge would be able to diagnose the problem. Those people were not here when the kid came to me twice to ask for help.
I think SPS is using a VPN to connect teachers and students. (I think. If it's something else, please feel free to comment.) I don't know why the VPN disconnected. I just know that it was a pain in the ass.
I also know that it was slow, about 8 mbps according to Google's speed test. So, in order to speed things up, I spent the afternoon drilling and banging and running and crimping to get an ethernet cable from the kid's room through the garage to the room where the modem lives.
The school laptop's wired speed is around 88 mbps now. I don't know if that will help on Tuesday with the drops, but it'll probably make for a clearer connection.
I think this is unfair as hell.
I think this is unfair as hell.
I'm not going to undo it, in case any of those Yet-You-Participate-In-Society-Curious dudes pop up out of their wells. I would like it for every other kid in Seattle Public Schools to have fast internet, and I don't think CenturyLink is the way to do it.
CenturyLink had $5.1B in revenues and $377M in profits in Q2 2020. We pay about $150/mo for our speeds. Why would any company give up those sweet, sweet profits? https://news.centurylink.com/2020-08-05-CenturyLink-Reports-Second-Quarter-2020-Results
Surprise! They wouldn't. Ever. Because they're bastards. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200902/08350945227/america-needs-to-stop-pretending-broadband-digital-divide-isnt-direct-result-corruption.shtml
Put municipal broadband on the list of stuff we need to yell about. It's not as high as smashing white supremacy, but it's not near the bottom, either.
Time to write, then get moist. See you all later.
