Safety Nets: Broadband & Wifi in a Post-Sandy World
This week New Tech City looks at New York's internet connectivity a year after Sandy knocked out communications for so many New Yorkers.
WNYC's Ilya Marritz tells the story of how parts of Red Hook, Brooklyn, have its own Wi-Fi courtesy of the local startup, Brooklyn Fiber. One of the technologies used involves "mesh wireless networking," something researcher Anthony Townsend, author of Smart Cities, discusses in detail.
Then Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, talks about the problems that arise when three internet service providers — Time Warner Cable, Verizon and Cablevision — control the market in New York City.
Finally, the story of one New York businessman who saved his small CPR training company from Sandy by storing everything in the cloud before to the storm hit; and how he's obsessed with backing everything up to this day.
