Linked List: August 23, 2020

Sunday, 23 August 2020

Wifi Dabba 

My thanks to Wifi Dabba for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. I’ve never had a sponsor quite like Wifi Dabba — they’re looking for investors in the DF audience, not customers.

India is a huge battleground — maybe the battleground — for the soul of the open internet. Remember Facebook Basics from a few years ago, where Facebook tried to effectively own “the internet” in India with an offering that pretty much just offered Facebook’s own services? It didn’t work, but they’re back, having recently purchased a nearly $6 billion stake in India’s largest telco. The root problem is the extreme expense required to deploy broadband. High costs naturally favor nation-states and existing telecom monopolies.

Wifi Dabba is attempting to solve India’s broadband problem from the bottom up. They’ve spent the last three years reinventing the network stack to lower the cost of broadband internet access. They use lasers instead of expensive underground fiber, and commodity components across the stack. This results in a network that is 100 times cheaper to deploy and 10 times cheaper for customers.

Right now they primarily serve their hometown of Bangalore, but are looking to expand nationwide. Their investors include YCombinator, VY Capital, and others — and they are looking for additional investors.

Buy a piece of their network and own the future of internet access in India.

57 Percent of Republicans Think Number of U.S. Deaths From Coronavirus Has Been ‘Acceptable’ 

From a CBS News survey of over 2,000 registered voters:

Number of U.S. deaths from coronavirus has been been acceptable / unacceptable:

Republicans: 57% / 43%
Democrats: 10% / 90%
Independents: 33% / 67%

The U.S. has over 176,000 deaths, and that number is growing by around 1,000 per day. According to the same poll, 73 percent of Republicans think the U.S. response to coronavirus is “going well”. This isn’t cultish — it’s a cult. Either a majority of Republicans are sociopaths or they’re so ignorant they have no idea how much worse the U.S. has handled COVID-19 than other industrialized nations. Washington Post columnist Brian Klaas, on COVID-19 deaths reported yesterday:

Italy: 3
France: 9
Japan: 14
Canada: 7
UK: 18
Germany: 3

United States: 974

Population of countries above: 439 million
Population of United States: 328 million

It’s almost over for other nations. Here in the U.S. COVID-19 is rampaging.