[RTC List] Outage Outrage

[Elaine Weinreb]

We "masses" might be more sympathetic if there were an affordable  
high-speed broadband service available for us to use.  There are 
thousands of households here in Humboldt who still have only dial-up and 
don't see that changing in the near future.  Most people regard the 
internet being down as a simple inconvenience, not too different from 
the power going off every time the wind goes above 30 mph. If I can't 
have broadband, why should I care if your cable goes down?



-- 
I honestly think we need to try seriously to reach out to a wider 
audience on this issue.
 
Many folks seemed to agree with the gist of what I was trying to get 
across ( with only one "poo-pooer" ).
 
I think everyone one who needs to know, does know that we IT folks are 
clamoring.
 
We now need to enlist the "masses", as it were.
 
Folks whose livelihoods are directly dependent upon this connection 
might not realize what an issue it is in aggregate. I'm talking about 
the store that couldn't accept "electric money", the neighbor around the 
corner who had to press a due date but couldn't get that bill paid 
online on time, some interesting stuff in the TS today -- say folks who 
lost pets and couldn't get online to track them, folks looking for that 
"sweat spot" booking on travel, etc, .  . . .and to quote another list 
member:
 
"I wish we could survey (maybe through other media driving folks to a 
survey site) all the small, non-tech businesses that were affected by 
the outage.  I'd like to hear stories of elders who couldn't get 
medicine, children who lost out on some school activity, small shops 
that lost sales, etc.  Everyone knows that tech businesses are affected, 
but it would be useful to illustrate how broad the ripple is." ( I 
didn't mention name though this was posted to the list, solely because I 
didn't have time to ask permission ).
 
We need to bring this home to "the people"; its not just us geeks who 
suffer from this issue, but it will take a "populist" pressure I suspect 
to get this seriously moving into action. HSU can study this all they 
want with their half million, but I don't expect much of anything to 
come out of that other than "Yes, it would likely be a good idea to have 
some redundancy up in here; give us another grant and we'll study how 
this might be accomplished.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://redwoodtech.org/pipermail/list_redwoodtech.org/attachments/20071010/9a054de6/attachment.html