Governments fund free mobile data for online school during pandemic - Business Insider

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Opinion | Parents can't afford WiFi for their children to attend classes. Governments should fund making mobile data free during the pandemic. By stokel.

don't have fast enough internet speeds to use video conferencing services that are the standard for at-home schooling during the pandemic. As a result, heartbreaking stories of kids sitting on sweltering asphalt outside libraries and Starbucks to "borrow" their free WiFi have hit the headlines.

So many suffer in silence. They stay away from library parking lots and stick within their own four walls, relying on patchy, costly roaming 4G connections, hotspotted from pay-as-you-go cell phones. The issue is that a video call can burn through 200 megabytes every hour — and data isn't cheap.

Education is more difficult, because there's not one universal website people turn to. But zero-rating alone is also ineffective. A better, though more radical solution for companies focused on profit, and governments on both sides of the Atlantic currently focused on encouraging profit, would be to make mobile data free — whether you're looking to learn, trying to escape today's stress by playing games, or determining whether that cough is a cold or coronavirus — after all, who are we to discriminate?

 

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stokel Please come to argentina, everything is free, nothing works. Plus, your taxes will increase, that means you will have less money to spend and you will need more 'free' services. A cycle that never ends until everyone is poor. Cheers from 🇦🇷!

stokel I don't understand how people think that just because they can't afford something that it should be given to them for free. If I want something that I can't afford I work more hours, get a second job, sell some things I don't need, ect....

stokel Mobile data free wouldn’t do anything because the signal strength wouldn’t be strong enough to support it

stokel Wahala

stokel It’s more of a Governor’s issue. It depends on state and local governments not so much federal. The telecom sector is probably not going to sit back and give people free data.

stokel More good news please(((

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