School districts are sending WiFi-equipped buses to poor and rural neighborhoods

Re:School districts are sending WiFi-equipped buses to poor ... by hocuspocus on Saturday May 09, 2020 @12:04PM (#23125882)

Rural Spain and France are a lot less dense than rural Germany though.

There's really no excuse for the state of broadband and cell coverage in your country. I lived two years in Mitte in Berlin, and I couldn't even make a phone call from my place! To add insult to the injury the BMVI was just around the corner; billboards about Gigabit broadband by 2025 reminded me everyday the country is 10 years behind where it could afford to be.

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Re:School districts are sending WiFi-equipped buses to poor ... by luckylion on Saturday May 09, 2020 @01:36PM (#23126659)

Yeah, it's a shame. There's lots of hope that mobile internet will fix it, but we've had the same hope with 3G and 4G.

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Re:School districts are sending WiFi-equipped buses to poor ... by ghaff on Saturday May 09, 2020 @01:55PM (#23126865)

Part of the problem is the goalposts move. The cellular data connection you can get in many places (though, of course, not everywhere) is probably a lot faster than back when WiMAX was being promoted as the fix for the last mile problem. And typical cellular data caps today would mostly look like all the bandwidth in the world going back 15 years or whatever.

Now, a lot of people don't think they have "real" broadband if everyone in the household can't be streaming Netflix at 4K simultaneously without any meaningful caps or throttling.

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Re:School districts are sending WiFi-equipped buses to poor ... by luckylion on Saturday May 09, 2020 @03:27PM (#23127605)

The issue in Germany is that we're somewhat behind on mobile traffic caps as well. It's gotten a lot better recently, but it's still on the high end in Europe on traffic/cost.

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