Tag: people

Alternative Broadband Networks: Affordable Internet for the People, One Rooftop at a Time

Amel
Alternative Broadband Networks: Affordable Internet for the People, One Rooftop at a Time

Before Marco Antonio Santana could speak English, he was speaking computers. Now, the 32-year-old, who grew up in a Dominican household in New York City, helps provide high-speed fiber internet installations and repairs to over 180 units in a low-income housing complex in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

“I’ve been a nerd my whole life,” he tells me, running a delicate strand of fiber-optic cable into a splicer in NYC Mesh’s workroom. 

We climb to the roof of the 26-story building with striking vistas of the city’s water towers, bridges and prewar buildings. There, multiple long-range antennas and routers connect wirelessly to other rooftop nodes as far out as Brooklyn, miles away across the East River. It’s one glimpse into the growing network that NYC Mesh has built over the last several years. 

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NYC Mesh is not an internet service provider, but a grassroots, volunteer-run community network. Its aim is to create an affordable, open and reliable network that’s accessible to all New Yorkers for both daily and emergency internet use. Santana says the group’s members want to help people determine their own digital future and “bring back the internet to what it used to be.”

Internet access is an essential part of our daily lives: for employment, health, education, communication, finances and entertainment. Yet there’s a staggering divide between those who can afford to connect and those who can’t. At least 42 million Americans are estimated to have no access to high-speed internet, according to the data technology company Broadband Now. 

The lack of low-cost, reliable broadband options densely weighs on poor, Black, Latino, indigenous and rural communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when being online was the only lifeline, the crisis became even more acute. 

“There’s a stark problem of access,” says Prem Trivedi, policy director at the Open Technology Institute. Students doing homework in a fast-food parking lot to get free Wi-Fi is not sustainable. “That’s an intermittent connection that requires upending your life to do bare necessities.”

Digital equity is a herculean mission. It means going up against the few incumbent ISPs — Xfinity, Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon and the like — that determine prices, terms of service, speeds and where infrastructure is built. 

“ISPs are always trying to maximize profits. We are just trying to connect our members for the lowest cost possible,” says Brian Hall, one of the lead volunteers and founders of NYC Mesh. 

Historically, when the private market fails to supply access to a basic good, communities have stepped in to fill in the gaps, according to Sean Gonsalves, associate director for communications at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. “It’s how the electric and telephone cooperatives got started in rural America a century ago.” 

NYC Mesh community Wifi on phone

Richard Peterson/CNET

Providing donation-based internet access is part of NYC Mesh’s objective to serve the underserved. The premise is that communication should be free. “We will never disconnect

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Comcast & Spectrum Are Battling As People in america Quit Signing Up For Online As Element of Twine Reducing 2.

Amel
Comcast & Spectrum Are Battling As People in america Quit Signing Up For Online As Element of Twine Reducing 2.

Individuals keep on to cut ties with cable online vendors and experiences from MoffettNathanson show cable broadband subscriber expansion numbers are plummeting yr above yr.

In the 3rd quarter of 2020, broadband subscriber development was at its highest in comparison to the 5-year span ahead of, which stayed very constant concerning 4.3 per cent and 7 per cent growth. The report reveals 7.4 % progress 12 months around yr for 2020. The final quarter of 2020 showed a drop to 7.3 percent yr about 12 months.

Broadband cable commenced 2021 with 6.9 percent growth year around calendar year and continued to drop approximately 1 percent every quarter throughout the 12 months, ending with 3.8 % expansion. 

This trend continued by means of 2022 as perfectly, starting off with 3.2 percent development in the to start with quarter, 2 p.c in the next quarter, and 1.2 per cent in the third quarter. By the end of the fourth quarter, broadband subscriber numbers had fallen to only .7 p.c development calendar year in excess of calendar year.

This comes as T-Cellular described that in just a few months of the 1st quarter of 2023, T-Mobile extra 523,000 residence internet clients.

That selection is far more new dwelling internet customers than AT&T, Comcast, Charter, and Verizon added in the 4th quarter of 2022 combined, in accordance to T-Cellular. This arrives as Individuals are remaining drawn to more affordable new solutions, together with T-Mobile’s $ 50-a-month property online assistance.

2023 is not searching promising for broadband cable possibly. Initial quarterly stories show a measly .1 p.c advancement. MoffettNathanson’s analyst Craig Moffett predicts broadband subscriber advancement to be “minimal heading forward”, estimating averages of .7 percent by means of 2027. 

This is all aside of what is currently being referred to as Wire Slicing 2. as Americans begin hunting for new solutions for not just Television but internet also.

Cable broadband suppliers are struggling with levels of competition from fiber and fixed wireless access service vendors. Fiber optic cable connections present more rapidly speeds in most spots alongside with larger bandwidth capacities.  

That’s not the only aspect contributing to subscriber losses. Pricing is heavily factored into people’s selections on no matter if switching providers is the ideal solution for them and a developing quantity of people have determined sure. 

Streaming expert services are cheaper than a cable package deal accompanying broadband products and services and there are various platforms that are completely absolutely free to use. Why pay out for broadband cable when you could switch to a much less expensive option shelling out only your web invoice?

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7 reasons why people believe SEO myths

Amel
7 reasons why people believe SEO myths
SEO myths vs facts

Some days in the world of SEO, it feels like “Groundhog Day” – the classic 1993 movie where Phil Conners (played by Bill Murray) repeats the same day over and over. 

But instead of the day repeating, one question gets asked over and over and over. It usually goes something like this: what are some common SEO myths you always hear that need to be debunked?

The topic of SEO myths and conspiracy theories is popular. We recently featured an article on myths (​​11 conspiracy theories about search, Google and Big Tech) here on Search Engine Land and have published several others in past years. So we won’t go into any actual myths or debunking here.

The bigger question is: why does your boss (and/or your co-workers and/or your team) keep asking you about these SEO myths? Or how did your client hear about some random, long-ago debunked tactic? Shouldn’t they know better?

Well, no. Not always. 

Part of your job is to understand and educate them about how search actually works – why E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor, why Domain Authority isn’t a metric Google uses or why LSI keywords are a ridiculous concept.

Read on to learn about the top reasons people believe SEO myths and how some SEO practitioners deal with them.

1. Repetition

SEO myths sound believable when repeated enough times. Misinformation tends to spread in our industry. It’s shared in conference presentations, in blog posts, on social media, on podcasts and elsewhere. Before you know it, you’ve got a myth (or a new SEO boogeyman). 

So if you find yourself in this situation, what should you do? 

Holly Miller Anderson, lead SEO product manager, North America, at Under Armour, put it this way: “Educate. Don’t argue.”

“One of the best things SEO leads can do is to be as proactive as possible about educating your org and leadership team against SEO myths,” Anderson said. “Host talks as often as possible (i.e. lunch and learn style) about SEO myths and invite people to come in and hear some of the myths, share the ones they’ve heard, and provide different resources and proof.”

This creates a safer space for people to voice their opinion or understanding about SEO without being viewed as stupid, Anderson added. It also gives the SEO lead a forum to address myths in a non-threatening way.

2. Myths typically are the “easy answer”

SEO is “free traffic.” At least, that’s how many clients view it. At times, SEO is oversimplified, to the point where clients think all you have to do is x, y and z and then sit back and wait for all the rankings, traffic, conversions and revenue.

Well, often the “too good to be true” answers turn out to be just SEO basics. Table stakes. Everybody is optimizing their meta tags, answering questions, making mobile-friendly sites and trying to create “great” content. 

Sometimes, even worse, these “easy answers” could actually be tactics that could inflict harm

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Blogger in Kazakhstan will help people today join soon after authorities slice web access

Amel
Blogger in Kazakhstan will help people today join soon after authorities slice web access

When riots and clashes with law enforcement broke out in Kazakhstan, preferred blogger Kunekei Nurlan was shocked to find that only a tiny variety of followers from overseas were seeing her tales.

“They started out writing: ‘All of Kazakhstan is in a vacuum, we cannot reach our kin. Why are you on the web?” Kunekei Nurlan informed Euronews.

The blogger hadn’t realised that authorities shut down the net in the whole state thanks to the VPN on her phone.

But most Kazakhstanis uncovered on their own not able to speak to cherished kinds or obtain info about what was occurring.

“I realised that I experienced obtain to information and facts in normal, to folks,” Nurlan, who prefers to use a pseudonym, reported.

Connecting with my brother

Friends and acquaintances stranded at airports in other nations around the world began to make contact with the blogger amid the crisis.

“They asked me to contact their good friends and moms and dads because mobile telephone and landline expert services in Kazakhstan were being doing the job,” Nurlan stated.

“We utilised our quantities to phone them, question them and give them messages, for case in point: ‘Marat is in Germany suitable now and are unable to get a flight.'”

She started acquiring far more messages on social media, not only from pals and acquaintances: “I could not bodily contact them all by myself any more. I ran out of income on my mobile phone, the lender apps and terminals did not operate, and we have been all sitting down at property, with no one particular heading out.”

Nurlan arrived up with the notion of setting up a team on Telegram, a single of the most preferred messenger apps in the state.

“I speedily announced that I was on the lookout for volunteers who also had obtain to the online to hook up individuals for the reason that the worst issue is when you you should not have any details,” she reported.

Kunekei Nurlan has obtained apps from hundreds of individuals not only from Kazakhstan but also from other nations around the world: Russia, Uzbekistan, Turkey and European Union member states.

In just a couple of days, the local community “Bauyrmen Bailanys”, which in Kazakh suggests “Linking with a brother” appeared. At the time of writing, the Telegram channel had more than 13,000 subscribers.

‘Psychologically hard’

Most of the messages have a title, a phone selection and a request to contact and see if the caller is harmless.

“Several of our citizens overseas cannot arrive at us since some do not know how to Skype, some do not know how to use a variety of apps,” suggests Nurlan, who is from Almaty, the country’s major metropolis.

On Friday (January 7) alone, the group acquired a lot more than 3,700 needs, and volunteers managed to get to most of them.

Whilst on the to start with working day they hardly handed on any challenging information, with the influx of requests, the situation started to adjust.

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