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T-Mobile Offers Relief for Hurricane Victims
lilrowdy18 writes "Eweek reports that T-Mobile is offering free Wi-Fi to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. This relief will be free until Sept 2 and an evaluation will be done to see if it will continue after that. The hot spots are only available to residents of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi and does not include phone service. The article also includes a link to a map of T-Mobile hotspots. At least we can use some form of communication to get in touch with loved ones."
I had a friend, located in Biloxi, MS contact me via SMS this morning to let me know that he and his family were all ok. Their house and their cars were flooded out. He had to turn off the mobile after a couple messages to conserve energy.
Now, I saw this story ahead of time (and t-mobile's site was already snail slow) but I got to the page for Mississippi. My SMS to him:
t-mobile is offering free wifi to hurricane victims: Flowood (Borders),
Kinkos (Hattiesburg & Jackson), and Starbucks (Ridgeland & Southaven)
Now, after I sent it, I thought about it. In the entire state of MS they have *5* wifi hotspots? Are these locations operational? Will they offer some electric draw for those that need it?
I really think it's great that t-mobile is offering this to those people affected by the storm but so few locations and many w/o power? What good can it really do? Skype, where are you?
Most of these people would probably prefer telephone service over Internet access. Luckily this guy was able to e-mail via SMS and get in touch w/those that care about him.
I'm just glad that one of the people I know from the area is ok and I wish all those affected by the storm the best of luck for a speedy and safe recovery.
I have put up a mirror of locations in text format. Hopefully this will be easier to disseminate.
Why would you only do it for 3 days and then "evaluate" whether you'll charge or not.
One word: Spammers. Or, more generally, idiots who *will* abuse the system. It's not like a food line where you can pretty easily evenly distribute scarce resources and prevent people from poisoning the stew.
After three days they'll have a pretty good idea of patterns of usage and optimize the service to weed out the abusers. They will also likely tweak the caches so that most frequently used resources will be readily available without tying up the backbones so much.
Chances are good it was sold to higher management as a good publicity stunt, but managment is afraid that it'll either become very costly, or they'll destroy the service for users who actually pay for it. So the 3-day completely free is a good compromise. They can gauge complaints and usage, and then make a longer term decision.
-Adam