'Bandwidth Divide' Could Bar Some From Free Online Courses

An anonymous reader writes "The Bandwidth Divide is a form of what economists call the Red Queen effect referring to a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass when Alice races the Red Queen. As the Red Queen tells Alice: 'It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' Keeping up with digital technology is like that race — it takes a continual investment of money and time just to keep up with the latest, and an exceptional amount of work to get ahead of the pack. 'The question is, What is the new basic?' said one researcher. 'There will always be inequality. But 100 years after the introduction of the car, not everybody has a Ferrari, but everyone has access to some form of motorized transportation through buses.' Well, not everyone, but even fewer people have the online equivalent. Colleges considering MOOCs should remember that."

Comments

more entitlements

[Anonymous Coward]

here we go again

Internet = Utility

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple as that.

Re:Internet = Utility

[BradleyUffner]

Yea cause heavily regulated utilities are such a great example of efficient operation as well as champions of innovation.

I don't want innovation from my ISP. All I want from them is an unfiltered, public IP Address, at the bandwidth they advertised.

Re:Internet = Utility

[RightwingNutjob]

Regulate out any incentive toward innovation and you can be assured that the advertised 14400 bps is all you're ever going to get.

Re:Internet = Utility

[PopeRatzo]

Let the phone, tablet and computer industries innovate.

All we need from the ISPs is bandwidth, which is delivered via wires on public land or via public airwaves.

They shouldn't be delivering content, selling ads or partnering with handset manufacturers.

Since the big telcos have proved they are incapable of functioning in a free market, then they need to become public utilities. The last thing we need is any of them getting any bigger.

Re:Internet = Utility

[PopeRatzo]

Regulate out any incentive toward innovation and you can be assured that the advertised 14400 bps is all you're ever going to get.

If you think about that for a second, you'll realize it's kind of dumb. If a behemoth like AT&T was capable of innovation, they wouldn't have been caught flat-footed by the new technology of the Internet. Hell it took them years to bully their way into the ISP market before they just decided to destroy all competition.

If they're going to benefit from running wires on public land, or using public spectrum, then they need to become a public utility.

Or, break them into tiny pieces so we can have actual competition in the ISP space again. Funny how people who would claim to worship the "free market" aren't really concerned about anti-competitive activity of these anti-free market corporations.

Re:Internet = Utility

[NFN_NLN]

I always find this comment somewhat amusing from Slashdot posters.

Bundling is a pain in the rear, but pretty much everyone on this site with cable television benefits from it. Do you really think that most of the channels we watch would exist without bundling? I'd hazard a guess that with the possible exception of the food channel, any channel remotely educational or special interest would be gone without bundling, because almost no one would sign up for them.

I call bullshit on losing Discovery and History channel. As for the others; why do you find it necessary to artificially prop up specialty channels?!
If the user base isn't there to support it, it should go, plain and simple. Either pass on the true cost to the customer or axe it.

Furthermore, what percentage of channels show their own in-house content and how much comes from shows that were shopped around? AMC's flagship series Breaking Bad -- made by Sony. If AMC the channel didn't exist, the show could still be shopped around to another channel. Maybe eliminating channels would clean up the ratio of quality shows on the channels that do exist?

Re:Internet = Utility

[westlake]

If you think about that for a second, you'll realize it's kind of dumb. If a behemoth like AT&T was capable of innovation, they wouldn't have been caught flat-footed by the new technology of the Internet.

Does the geek have any notion of the extraordinary debt --- the full debt --- he owes to the "old" AT&T and Bell Labs? The monopoly which among other things did pioneering research in long distance communications and mobile. The first papers on cellular radio.

At its peak, Bell Laboratories was the premier facility of its type, developing a wide range of revolutionary technologies, including radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language and the C++ programming language. Seven Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.

1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.

1956: John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley received the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the first transistors.

1977: Philip W. Anderson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing an improved understanding of the electronic structure of glass and magnetic materials.

1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.

1997: Steven Chu shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

1998: Horst Stormer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect/

2009: Willard S. Boyle, George E. Smith shared the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Charles K. Kao. Boyle and Smith were cited for the invention of charge-coupled device (CCD) semiconductor imaging sensors.

The Turing Award has twice been won by Bell Labs researchers:

1968: Richard Hamming for his work on numerical methods, automatic coding systems, and error-detecting and error-correcting codes.

1983: Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their work on operating systems theory, and their development of Unix.

During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the laboratories. Bell Labs' Claude Shannon later proved that it is unbreakable....

Bell Labs

This list is endless, really. You could fill pages with this stuff and only scratch the surface.

Re:Where are these people?

[SJHillman]

Depends on what you mean by "available". If you mean "geographically available", then I can think of a few dozen people I know who are limited to slow dial-up or spotty satellite that doesn't work half the time due to weather. If you mean "financially available" then I can think of a few dozen people that might be able to scrape it together each month, but it would be a really poor financial choice.

Re:Universal Service for Broadband

[XxtraLarGe]

We don't have a discussion about universal cell phone access...

Check your cell phone bill next time. You'll see a line on there for something like "Universal Service Fee" which is a tax the phone companies pass on to you, so somebody can get their "Obamaphone".

Re:Universal Service for Broadband

[Rockoon]

So, no, not everybody has access to basic broadband service if they want it, 1.5mbps was barely acceptable 10 years ago.

Thats almost twice the bandwidth needed for 480p youtube as tested just moments ago using the free educational video made by sixtysymbols on transistors (link to video)

Note that the MAXIMUM quality of these videos is 480p, and the final raw badwidth count (includes packet overhead and so on) was 98.1KB/sec which is about 785kbps.

It seems to me and I think I have shown it to be true that people are actually crying about the availability of highest quality media, and not so much access. That these two distinct things get equated is the consequence of people so easily stooping into the realm of intellectual dishonesty in the name of wants instead of needs.

fairfax county schools

[sdnoob]

TFA refers to a pilot project by fairfax county schools. their project would not have failed miserably if they implemented it properly: with offline-capable ereaders preloaded with the proper texts and materials.. but instead, they opted for content and a system that required internet access (presumably due to drm at the publisher's insistance) to use, which limited access to those with sufficient internet access at home AND limited _where_ students could read and study their texts. a preloaded offline ereader would have eliminated those major issues with a conversion to digital texts. if fairfax county school board had listened to complaints and concerns expressed prior to them choosing this defective system, and not gotten memorized by slick salesmen, their system _could have been_ a model for public schools nationwide - instead they just fucked up big time.

I don't understand

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have been taking some excellent coursera courses which are probably somewhat typical in overall bandwidth needs. The only real bandwidth hog would be the videos which I usually download to my iPad. So short of a 56k Modem I might have to wait for these videos but with only minor delays almost any crappy bandwidth would allow me to take these courses. Also keep in mind that determined people also have sneakernets. That is someone in my group of friends will grab the data and then using USB memory sticks will distribute the goods around. I remember in the early days of the Internet one friend would grab something and then burn the amazing hundreds of megs to CD. And before that one person would grab 3 or more floppies from a BBS and then we would all faithfully copy them. Before that it was pure floppy to floppy movement of data. So saying that you are on the wrong side of a bandwidth margin is just bizarre.

So unless all the MOOCs suddenly change their model to highly interactive 3D environments I suspect that most learners with the most moderate internet access will be just fine.

Only the caveat of some kind of skype type live learning would demand goodish bandwidth but I don't see much education heading that way except for those services that are determined to maintain their tutoring per hour business models which really wouldn't apply to the same people who are supposedly on the wrong side of the digital divide.

And on top of all that my experience in poorer countries is that internet access is really cheap by our standards and their infrastructure is leapfrogging ours. In Jamaica for instance for $40 a month you get unlimited 3G data access nearly everywhere along the coast and as for tethering they sell cool d-link wi-fi routers that you put a SIM card into to have home internet.

If you are a kid in a poor place a bit of industriousness in obtaining a crap old pentium(or raspberry pi), a CRT, a USB stick, and occasional internet access and you will be able to fill your brain with all you ever wanted. Add in an NGO with the goal of making this easier and whole communities will be just fine.

Re:Universal Service for Broadband

[grcumb]

I find it Intereresting and disturbing that in the US we provide "Universal Service" for many old technologies - US Mail, Analog Telephones, and T1s, but we don't even have a discussion about universal broadband.

That's all well and good, and I agree that access to internet should be taken as a basic service, but did nobody else notice the real evil in this story:

The e-textbooks used in the project, run by the Fairfax County Public Schools, worked only when students were online—and some features required fast connections.

Why the fuck was there not an offline version of this textbook? I don't want to go all Stallmannite, but the problem right here is not lack of bandwidth. The problem here is a fucking textbook that can't be downloaded and used offline.