While municipalities continue to struggle with their Wi-Fi deployments and providers such as Earthlink back away from the business, NASA officials say they are fully committed to bringing ubiquitous wireless broadband to the sprawling Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Moreover, they pledge to have the projected completed by the year 2017 and bring it in at the bargain-basement price (by government standards) of only $655 million.
From a published report:
According to agency officials, accessing the Internet has been an ongoing struggle for NASA. Still relying on a single dial-up modem, employees nevertheless continue to get disconnected from the Internet whenever the Johnson Space Center receives an incoming call or someone picks up the phone to dial out. In 2005, NASA attempted to upgrade from dial-up to DSL, but the program was aborted when engineers were unable to get the Ethernet hub to function.
Of course, that report is from The Onion.
On the other hand, the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt is no joke.
When not blogging, I am a Network World news editor and write the 'Net Buzz column.
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Fool me once
You fooled me at first. :) I could buy that they were planning to install campus-wide wi-fi. But the dial-up mention certainly gave me pause...