The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, began offering free Internet service to a number of public housing projects, says the NY Times. The apartments will be connected to the Internet at 100 megabits a second.
The first project to be connected is Valencia Gardens in the city’s Mission District, with 260 units. It is now up and running in a pilot project. The project expects to wire more than 2,500 units in the city over the next 8 to 10 months, said Brewster Kahle (right), the founder of the Internet Archive, which is best known for its digital archiving work.
The project will establish a direct link between the housing units and the Internet Archive itself, allowing residents to “instantly view DVD-quality videos of the thousands of lectures and other educational information from the Internet Archive’s collections, as well as traditional Internet access.”
The Internet Archive is working with the city of San Francisco to connect the city’s municipal fiber-optic network, which runs through the public housing developments, and the Internet Archive switching center.
“We are pleased to be the first nonprofit organization to bring public housing online,” Mr. Kahle said. “We are excited to see much faster access to the Internet as a way to experiment with advanced applications, and are pleased that the underserved get first access to advanced technology.”
SFLan is Kahle’s experimental wireless community network in the San Francisco Bay Area. They aim to build a wireless network with LAN characteristics on a metropolitan scale and are proposing a city-wide network that addresses low income users, in lieu of the pullout by Earthlink.
Charlie Rose interviewed another brilliant innovator last night — Ted Turner
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