Wireless Brownsville

St. Cloud, Florida has provided a free wireless network to anyone in the city limits. http://www.stcloud.org/documents/Cyber%20Spot/Cyber%20Spot%20FAQ_1.pdf

This is a 15 square mile grid and cost $3 million to set up. Brownsville is more than 80 square miles so, the project would not be as simple.

Many big cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia had similar wireless plans, but the projects have run into trouble when the service provider EarthLink reneged on the deal.

Some areas such as NYC have aimed more at providing wireless parks and public buildings.

I don't know whether any of this is feasible for Brownsville, but it would seem the potential would be great.

Providing greater access to computers would be nice also. What would it cost to give a laptop to every 6th grader? I recall Newt Gingrich had a similar plan, so this is not just my personal weirdness. (Though it may be a shared weirdness--sort of a Folie a Deux for politicos.)

I have heard about the $100 laptop plan for poor areas. We should qualify. Even without that computers have gotten less and less expensive. I am typing this on a $300 computer called ASUS eee. It is cheap because it dodges Microsoft by using the Linux operating system (which I prefer).

I think of the flowering that Brownsville kids had when JJ Guajardo and others decided to teach them chess. All of a sudden, Russell Elementary kids being raised without the benefits of Suburbans, summer camps and math clinics were on a level with the top students in the most expensive schools in the country.