>From the prospective of our mission, telecommunications advocacy for
residents and businesses, individuals and institutions, in Westchester
County, I think that we have some givens:
* Westchester County is one of the most affluent regions in the world.
While we do have pockets of poverty and deprivation in the county, I suspect
that limited access to any form of telecommunications is not significant ...
where there's and interest, there's a capability, even in the ghetto.
* The telecommunications providers have repeatedly demonstrated that they
are quite willing and able to expand capacity and access to meet demand.
Obviously, their more commercially attractive opportunities have first
priority ... if an area code or a wireless cell gets overloaded, new ones
arise.
* I haven't seen any published statistics, but I suspect that only a
relatively small portion of this advantaged population (economically,
educationally or experientially) use e-mail regularly ... either personally,
professionally or organizationally. I doubt that low usage could be
attributed to lack of access for Westchesterites.
* As an observation, an even smaller proportion of the population utilize
telecommunication for educational, information access and general information
dissemination purposes. Some of this is due to limited access (for example,
while many schools have personal computers, few have the lines or modems to
reach the world outside of their buildings. This is often true with
commercial enterprises as well.). Some is due to perceived unavailability of
useful materials ... this is decreasing daily. Most is due to lack of
experience with the emerging telecommunications capabilities.
If WATPA is to be truly helpful, we need to focus on a couple of critical
items:
* If there is good survey or other statistics about access, capability and
usage in the county, we should make certain that this gets widely
disseminated. If not, we should encourage an information gathering effort.
* Our greatest value continues to be educational ... there are very few
members of our constituency (including the most advantaged) who understand
what's available, how and why it could be valuable or how to apply it. If we
can help to effectively raise the demand, I suspect that the supply won't be
a problem.