'Bandwidth Divide' Could Bar Some From Free Online Courses 222
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."
Where are these people? (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between those who have access to fast connections and those who have only dial-up speeds or access via a cellphone is "bigger than people think," he said.
Quick. Name three people you know (not just people you've heard of) who fall into the above category because "fast connections" are not physically available to them.
Re:Universal Service for Broadband (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, so how about my home connection. 56K is what we pay for, but we get 41K when the weather is good. It's 1/10th the speed of my 3G phone (When I'm in range of a tower). That is no where near enough to stream even the smallest YouTube video. And that's the best we can get at any price. I'm a couple miles outside a small midwestern town. Wireless is our only option and the only wireless data that gets any rections here is a 2G tower 12 miles away. With a directional antena we can duplex that. The phone lines here are crap so no DSL, even satellite is out because we don't have an upload signal path. We're not that unusual.
With that meager bit of data we can email. (And /.). But using the web is incredibly painful. Video is straight out. Skype doesn't happen. System updates are flaky and take all day to download. Web pages aren't made for connections this slow any more, they're hundreds of K, and can take minutes to load, and some connection will often get lost, which will bork the whole page.
No one uses the internet here. They don't know what it's for. They don't know they can find out anything with it, that they can learn the skills to take them further, or talk to people all over the planet. Or get movies on demand! You won't hear much from them around here because they don't know about Slashdot. Or online discussion forums in general. The Internet is a thing that they talk about on (broadcast) TV.
So while some people might bitch about only getting 1.5mbs, there are no shortage of people in the United States who essentially can't use the modern internet.