On Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:14:36 -0800, Dave Taht said: > I have already asked for a chance to question or speak, but if others > here would like a shot at getting into the roundtable, send an email > to the contact asking whether you can either ask a question or speak. > That's christian.hoefly at fcc.gov > established an Emergency Broadband Connectivity Fund of $3.2 billion > and directed the Federal Communications Commission to use that fund to > establish an Emergency Broadband Benefit Program, through which > eligible households may receive a discount off the cost of broadband > service and certain connected devices during an emergency period > relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, and participating providers can be > reimbursed for such discounts. Amen. I'm personally doing OK here, but I know there's a lot of children in Montgomery County here in southwest Virginia who are struggling to afford enough bandwidth for Zoom for classes. A lot of them live outside the town limits of the two big towns, so they're out of luck for both DSL and cable - and though there's cellphone coverage, if you have 2-3 kids all doing Zoom for several hour a day, you get data-cap throttled pretty early in the month. I suspect, but don't have hard data, that the majority of them would be managing just fine as long as their account didn't have a monthly data cap. > > It might be useful for some of us to crash this. I've always kind of > > thought that having a "router reclamation center" where users could > > drop off old, but reflashable routers, and get theirs reflashed with > > openwrt, might be a useful government program. OpenWRT rocks if you're technologically clued. What would really help adoption is if it sprouted a more Joe Sixpack-friendly UI that made it easy to configure stuff like "Turn off Danny's access at his bedtime at 10, and Joanie's turns off at midnight". I'd volunteer to help, but I know something between diddly and squat about writing UI code - I'm basically a kernel hacker who did a lot of server sysadmin.