Free Internet Access?

[Lorraine Pozzi]

On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Rod Clark wrote:

> > http://www.npr.org/news/national/970116.freenet.html
> > 
> > NPR needs to be informed of SCN and the like, it can be done with out "in
> > your face" advertising.
> 
>    SCN can support 15 phone lines at 14.4k bps on a realistic
> "free" budget in a city the size of Seattle. That's an
> incredibly tiny fraction of the bandwidth that people need and
> use here in the Seattle area. SCN can do even that much only by
> offering a few limited text-only services that are frankly
> inadequate and obsolete for most uses.

These issues really do need to be addressed -- and there is a
Planning Committee that is supposed to be addressing them.
Rod, why not come to the General Meeting an hour early --
we have to find a better time to accommodate some of the people
interested in PC -- but we have the room for an extra hour to
meet with folks who want to have more time for input into planning
future directions and implications of SCN and SCNA.

And, of course, what some of the offerings of free e-mail (with
advertising) and the free terminals of the Speakeasy RAIN
network mean to our organization's future.

Can you join us?

Lorraine Pozzi
femme2 at scn.org

And I'll try to bring a copy of the newsletter put out by
Powerful Schools (with no nods to the work of SCN, BTW) about
the recycling of old, donated computers into very low-income
households served by Powerful Schools (Orca, Hawthorne, and??)
Or, as the Computer Charity Bank puts it, "To you it's old,
to us it's gold."  
> 
>    Freenets occupy a valuable but limited niche on the Internet.
> Cutting services to such a low level is an acceptable answer for
> some users, but isn't realistic for most current Internet uses.
> 
>    There's a hardware equivalent to Freenets, too. Ask any
> business with a storeroom full of dusty IBM XT's and AT's
> whether they'd be willing to donate them to a nonprofit public
> service organization. Those XT's and AT's occupy the same place
> in the world that SCN does. 
> 
>    On the other hand, advertiser-supported services expect to
> provide full services to millions of people. The budget needed
> to do that is far outside the scope of Freenets - SCNA's recent
> fundraising drive raised about one dollar fifty cents per user
> for the year. On that kind of Freenet budget, where's Real Audio
> on SCN? Where's streaming video? Can you try out CU-SeeMe
> teleconferencing, or anything else that's expanding the ability
> of people to communicate in newer and better ways over the Net?
> 
>    The advent of advertiser-supported services like the one in
> the NPR story is news that potentially affects the kind of
> Internet services that most people use and want. SCN hasn't come
> up with any news like that lately, and it isn't likely to.
> 
> Rod Clark
> 
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