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Wireless along the Maine Coast
eggboard writes: "The coast of Maine started getting lit up by wireless over long distance back in 1997. Now hundreds of users, some of them dozens of miles from the connecting ISP's HQ, use plain old 802.11, 802.11b's predecessor, to hit nearly 2 Mbps of throughput. Cable Internet is broken out there; DSL unreachable; ISDN expensive. Other communities are also adopting tower-based point-to-point, bridge and repeater wireless to bring broadband to rural and small towns. Is this the way to drag lesser-populated areas into the modern economy, and promote deurbanization?"
Agreed. The idea that deurbanization is something that should be blandly promoted is getting pretty old. I love how off-the-cuff the remark in the original post is; it's almost as if we're all convinced that the cities should be emptied out, and only details remain.
The anti-urban crowd have also popped up for a series of idiotic, tasteless suggestions about the WTC bombing (perhaps if we didn't work in these big downtowns, we'd all be much safer).
Face it, guys. There's a reason that people pay megabucks for downtown office space in big cities: promixity to other real people. We've had Internet access, videoconferencing, Kinkos, etc. in suburbia/exburbia for years and somehow the city centers refuse to empty out.
This not to mention the very real externalities imposed by deurbanization; you know, chewing up green space, the inevitable commute once it turns out that big-screen TV and DSL fail to substitute for a social life and a vibrant work environment, etc. etc.
If you want to live a life as a wired hermit, good for you, but don't expect too many people to join you any time soon.