technical adventures
another score the technical front for oregon. i love reading about my home state leading the nation when it comes to social issues like city wide wi-fi. the folks over in morrow county have set-up a large wireless highspeed network over the city of hermiston. largely this came from the need to monitor and provide quick and effect evacuation stratagies should the massive umatilla chemical munitions dump start acting all weird like. however, some very euntrapranurial folks capitolized on this and decided to make the network large enough that anyone can use it. one of the things that makes this particular project so amazing is that the average citizen gets to log into the network for free. that's right, free high speed, wireless internet, anywhere in the city. hell, it's even further out from the city, into the farmlands. the network covers an area of roughly 700 miles square.
what makes it possible for this to exist in a county where there is only roughly 3,784 households is that verison and qwest don't see any economic reason to put money into the area. the reality is, verison and qwest barily provide any sort of broadband connection at all in the county. if this model works, we might see rural areas popping up with large wireless networks all over the place. soon, only the big city will be stuck in the dark ages of wired internet connections. an interesting proposition.
what makes it possible for this to exist in a county where there is only roughly 3,784 households is that verison and qwest don't see any economic reason to put money into the area. the reality is, verison and qwest barily provide any sort of broadband connection at all in the county. if this model works, we might see rural areas popping up with large wireless networks all over the place. soon, only the big city will be stuck in the dark ages of wired internet connections. an interesting proposition.