Dewayne Hendricks on Wi-Fi’s potential

Dewayne Hendricks on Wi-Fi’s potential and the cost of bandwidth

Dewayne Hendricks, one of the contributors to this website, was one of the speakers at the recent Freedom To Connect conference organized by David Isenberg on April 3-4, 2006 in Washington DC. He talked about the potential of Wi-Fi to deliver huge amounts of bandwidth to areas long neglected by service providers and the growing interest among counties for wide-area networks.

In the recent debate over the US ranking in broadband penetration (OECD’s data), Dewayne asserts that what we should be aiming for is getting the price per megabit of bandwidth down — to 24 cents. While many of us focus on the latest OECD rankings (where broadband is defined in many countries as 200 Kbps and over), Dewayne thinks we should be looking at how many people have true broadband connections (over 10 Mbps) and how much they pay for true broadband. And then we can rank countries according to just how affordable TRUE broadband is.

Here is the link to Dana Blankenhorn’s site which contains the transcript of Dewayne’s presentation. Also listen to the interview of Dewayne conducted by Colin Rhinesmith of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.