[Bloat] [Cerowrt-devel] Feb 12th: FCC virtual roundtable to gather public input on how to structure the new Emergency Broadband Benefit Program

[Valdis Kl=?utf-8?Q?=c4=93?=tnieks]

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.

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