It is still an impediment, but it is not a showstopper. If you start making enough money, you stop identifying as homeless. You either get back into housing or you start identifying as a digital nomad, which is simply a lifestyle choice.
Even digital nomads talk about how that lifestyle can make it difficult to sit down and concentrate on your work. Being technically able to work from anywhere doesn't change the fact that lack of a dedicated work space (and routine, etc) tends to hamper productivity. Some digital nomads settle in someplace for a few weeks or months at a time in order to carve out blocks of productive time.
Unlike well heeled digital nomads who can spend fair sums at cafes, homeless people tend to not be welcome to hang out on their laptop or tablet for hours at a time. They aren't presentable enough and they aren't spending enough money. They tend to get thrown out and told to not come back if they try to hang too long at a commercial establishment.
Urban areas should just give wifi internet access away though, it's not terribly costly.
Even the tiny town of Pescadero, CA has free high-speed wifi internet provided by San Mateo county.
Block YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram and Reddit's video service, plus Facebook.
Magically, 90% of the issues there resolve themselves very quickly.
> Bandwidth limiting would need implemented, which make make the network useless for VoIP or streaming.
Not necessarily. You could implement a fast-lane that only allowed access to a few sites, like Google Voice, to allow VoIP for those who really needed it.
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The biggest concern with this would be the privacy implications it could have. Especially considering that the homeless are less likely to be in-the-know with infosec, it seems like an incredibly quick way to have a lot of personal information stolen quite quickly.
How is this any different from any other deployment of wireless service to a given population? It's just the taxpayers pay the bill.
Or are you suggesting that some users are going to deploy multiple clients to hoard the bandwidth? That seems like a solvable problem.
I just wanted honestly answer the comment about why cryptocurrency is better in this case (even if it’s not all cryptocurrency).
I could also say why it’s worse: price instability (that $100 you had to your name is now $70), no way to force a refund, not widely used, and you have to manage keys. I’m sure there are more.
Non-homeless people would use such a service as well, but it would be especially valuable to homeless, who could be given bitcoin/altcoin or perhaps obtain it from crypto ATMs.
Not having a physical address is a huge impediment to functioning in our society. Without a physical address, you can't have a credit card or a bank account. Without a credit card, you can't have a cell phone for internet access, or a gym membership to take a shower.
But shower facilities or gyms that allowed you to buy one month at a time with crypto, coupled with internet access that could be purchased with crypto, would allow people to function pretty normally in this society without a physical address. Neither of these would need to be specifically for homeless, nor would they need to be tax payer funded.