My daughter has settled in Paris for the spring semester, arriving two weeks ago. She is staying in a lovely private home arranged by the American University there as a part of an exchange program with U.C. Berkeley. What an experience for her - I’m envious!
So what does this have to do with a blog on technology? Read on.
In preparation for her trip there, we tried to find out if she would have some kind of broadband access from her apartment, hoping that we could sign her up for a VOIP phone number and hook in the adapter there so she could call home for free and vice versa. But of course we soon found out that broadband was not available, in fact, it is apparently not nearly as common a thing in private homes there. So, we told her to start looking for cheap calling cards.
She also started wondering about how she was going to get her assignments. At Berkeley, everyone is online - everyone. They sign up for classes online, get their assignments, turn in their assignments, they collaborate in groups online for projects and they communicate with their professors online. They even take tests and quizzes online in some cases. The internet is totally integrated into the school experience and every student is expected to have access to a computer and the internet.
No so at the American University in Paris. Here they don’t even have a system for the students to sign up for classes online. It’s all done on paper, so you don’t know what classes are open or not until you submit your requests in person. Seems pretty archaic to me. So at this university, the students get their assignments in lecture, turn in their assignments on paper the same way, and make appointments to see the professor via phone. It’s all quite traditional and civilized and I suppose there is nothing wrong with it from an educational perspective. But it is fascinating to me that Berkeley is so far ahead technologically. After all, one expects the major capitals of the world to be at the forefront of technology, or at least close, and the large universities in those cities to be examples for all to follow.
So, on her third day there, my daughter noticed an internet cafe a block from her apartment, and resigned herself to going there to check her e-mail and tell us when she would call. Apparently this is how a great many people in Paris use the internet. We still have them in the U.S. but they are rapidly becoming obsolete.
But then something extraordinary happened. For some reason my daughter decided to move her computer closer to the window in her room and voila’ a window popped up on her screen saying that her laptop had found a wireless network. Apparently the college, which is about a half block away has a wireless network broadcasting with a strong signal. She clicked “ok” and she was online! No authentication whatsoever.
How I found out about all this is I got an e-mail from her all excited that she is online. She was experiencing definite signs of internet withdrawal, but now everything is right with the world again. Now we can chat online and exchange pictures daily using Picasa and Hello (both excellent and free thanks to Google) and the phone bills look they may now be manageable.
As the title of this post says, this is only a glimpse of Paris, and I suspect that the city is really much more technologically advanced than these comments would suggest. It will be interesting to follow my daughter’s education in French culture and to see how such a fiercely nationalistic country steeped in tradition deals with the pressures of ever-changing technology. I will post an update in a few months as more data flows across the Atlantic.
Saturday, January 22
Friday, January 21
Narrow Minded Geeks
I confess - I’m guilty of it just like many other people. What I’m talking about is the state of mind that people fall into when they start to think that the rest of the country is just like them, with the same problems and the same choices.
The actual truth is a lot different, and for me it takes a regular Whack on the Side the Head (to borrow a phrase from Roger von Oech) to keep me from regressing into the stereotyping trap.
So while I was talking to Virgil the other day (he’s a friend who lives in the eastern part of L.A. about 30 miles away from me), I got my Whack administered when he told me he can’t get broadband in his neighborhood. Their cable company doesn’t offer broadband and he was told that his house was two blocks outside of the boundary where he could get DSL. He even checked into a satellite uplink setup and they still want over $500 for the equipment and about $75/month.
Now this just didn’t make sense to me because we both live in the metropolitan area of LA. It’s not like he lives out in some rural valley where you schedule your trips into town. We’re talking one of the largest urbanized areas of the world – the proverbial concrete jungle that goes on for a hundred miles. Furthermore, Virgil lives in a pretty nice neighborhood of middle to upper class suburban homes where you would expect the demand to be pretty high for broadband.
I guess what struck me the most was that I’ve had DSL for over three years and I guess I just assumed that everyone in the LA area had a choice of either DSL or cable broadband if they wanted it.
I started thinking: If Virgil can’t get broadband in Los Angeles, then how can broadband be spreading so fast through out the country? It makes me suspicious of industry statistics that claim 50% of home internet users now have broadband. Seems sort of unlikely now doesn’t it? If you go to the website DSL reports, you can do a test to see if your house is within 18,000 feet of the central office, which is apparently the limit for reliable DSL service. For those of you who forgot your high school math, that’s about 3 ½ miles.
Now I know that there are a heck of a lot of homes in this country that are more than 3 ½ miles from a central phone office, and who also don’t have broadband cable running all the way out to their houses. These rural folks have electricity, and phone service and they get their TV from a little satellite dish mounted on the side of the barn. Maybe these numbers are extrapolations from polls taken in urban areas, or maybe they have users mixed up with households. For instance, I have one DSL account, 4 people who share it, and 7 different e-mail addresses. The statistics could vary quite a lot depending on which one of those numbers you are counting.
Sometimes I think that the enormous tech industry in the U.S. is so totally insular and hyped up on themselves that they have completely forgotten about the guy who works all day at some regular non-technical job and is struggling to protect his own version of “the simple life.” He doesn’t have 3 computers networked to a DSL modem with internet connections to a media server and wireless connections to his internet enabled refrigerator. He doesn’t even own a laptop and can’t imagine why someone would lug one to Starbucks to surf the net. The only thing that really connects this guy to the high tech industry on a personal level is his cellphone, which he bought so his wife can contact him when he is out on a job to ask him to buy milk on his way home.
After braving the crowds at CES in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure that the majority of technical enthusiasts (i.e. geeks) that I saw there have very little contact with the folks who are labeled “late adopters.” Maybe it would be a good idea to set up a revolving program to send all these account executives of high tech firms out to roam the country in a mobile home for a month each. They would certainly get a whole new perspective on the broad profile of the American consumer. I’ll drive.
The actual truth is a lot different, and for me it takes a regular Whack on the Side the Head (to borrow a phrase from Roger von Oech) to keep me from regressing into the stereotyping trap.
So while I was talking to Virgil the other day (he’s a friend who lives in the eastern part of L.A. about 30 miles away from me), I got my Whack administered when he told me he can’t get broadband in his neighborhood. Their cable company doesn’t offer broadband and he was told that his house was two blocks outside of the boundary where he could get DSL. He even checked into a satellite uplink setup and they still want over $500 for the equipment and about $75/month.
Now this just didn’t make sense to me because we both live in the metropolitan area of LA. It’s not like he lives out in some rural valley where you schedule your trips into town. We’re talking one of the largest urbanized areas of the world – the proverbial concrete jungle that goes on for a hundred miles. Furthermore, Virgil lives in a pretty nice neighborhood of middle to upper class suburban homes where you would expect the demand to be pretty high for broadband.
I guess what struck me the most was that I’ve had DSL for over three years and I guess I just assumed that everyone in the LA area had a choice of either DSL or cable broadband if they wanted it.
I started thinking: If Virgil can’t get broadband in Los Angeles, then how can broadband be spreading so fast through out the country? It makes me suspicious of industry statistics that claim 50% of home internet users now have broadband. Seems sort of unlikely now doesn’t it? If you go to the website DSL reports, you can do a test to see if your house is within 18,000 feet of the central office, which is apparently the limit for reliable DSL service. For those of you who forgot your high school math, that’s about 3 ½ miles.
Now I know that there are a heck of a lot of homes in this country that are more than 3 ½ miles from a central phone office, and who also don’t have broadband cable running all the way out to their houses. These rural folks have electricity, and phone service and they get their TV from a little satellite dish mounted on the side of the barn. Maybe these numbers are extrapolations from polls taken in urban areas, or maybe they have users mixed up with households. For instance, I have one DSL account, 4 people who share it, and 7 different e-mail addresses. The statistics could vary quite a lot depending on which one of those numbers you are counting.
Sometimes I think that the enormous tech industry in the U.S. is so totally insular and hyped up on themselves that they have completely forgotten about the guy who works all day at some regular non-technical job and is struggling to protect his own version of “the simple life.” He doesn’t have 3 computers networked to a DSL modem with internet connections to a media server and wireless connections to his internet enabled refrigerator. He doesn’t even own a laptop and can’t imagine why someone would lug one to Starbucks to surf the net. The only thing that really connects this guy to the high tech industry on a personal level is his cellphone, which he bought so his wife can contact him when he is out on a job to ask him to buy milk on his way home.
After braving the crowds at CES in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure that the majority of technical enthusiasts (i.e. geeks) that I saw there have very little contact with the folks who are labeled “late adopters.” Maybe it would be a good idea to set up a revolving program to send all these account executives of high tech firms out to roam the country in a mobile home for a month each. They would certainly get a whole new perspective on the broad profile of the American consumer. I’ll drive.
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