Amazon, Microsoft join Italy’s initiative to offer free Wi-Fi, eBooks

http://alugy.com/europe/amazon-microsoft-joins-italys-initiative-to-offer-free-wi-fi-ebooks-unlimited-mobile-data/

by Lagogarda • 6 years ago

153 40 6 years ago

Kipters4• 6 years ago

As far as I can see, Teams is going to gain A TON of users in the coming weeks, most universities and schools are starting to use it to provide online lessons to their students, far more than Meet

starfallg• 6 years ago

The go to software is actually Zoom. It does webinars and has a host of features specifically tailored for this market.

Universities are by-and-large, not Microsoft shops.

Teams is picking up from Lync/Skype-for-Business in many Microsoft shops.

jmiskovic• 6 years ago

Do you have any data? Are you from Italy or speaking from your bubble?

I couldn't find any data about Italy. From personal experience in neighbor country Croatia, all universities are Microsoft shops and nobody even knows what Zoom is.

Kipters4• 6 years ago

My comment was specific to Italy :) I know people in at least two universities that are using Teams and Stream for online lessons (many universities in Italy use Office 365)

chefkoch3• 6 years ago

At least in Germany all universities allow you to use most Microsoft stuff for free.

CobsterLock• 6 years ago

I thought a lot of schools took advantage of DreamSpark, or what ever the education program is called now. When I was in school, we could log in and download pretty much any Microsoft program or OS (server and consumer) with full licenses.

We didn't use any of the Microsoft programs as part of our education (no skype or teams), I think we transitioned from GMail to Outlook Online by the time I graduated

bitlash2• 6 years ago

As a student in one of the main universities in northern Italy, I can tell you the lessons are provided through the open source platform BigBlueButton. Student/teacher personal sessions although seem to rely primarily on skype.

donapieppo3• 6 years ago

In University of Bologna all professors are supposed to use Teams.

Kipters4• 6 years ago

Which one? PoliMi for one uses Teams (glad to know someone is using OSS software though)

lloydatkinson• 6 years ago

Strange, a BBC news clip I saw the other day had an italian professor saying they are all using webex.

I can't imagine how frustrating using that for lessons (so multiple connected parties) would be - it's hard enough to make it work with just two parties. Either the video works and no sound, or sound works but no video. Or just doesn't even connect.

Very unreliable from what I've seen.

sweetdreamerit• 6 years ago

I'm teaching at University of Trento. At the moment I'm using google meet + google classroom. Today my class was followed by 45 students, and everything worked well. Yesterday I was unable to record the lesson, but today it worked. As a backup, I used Audacity to record the audio (the slides are freely available online)

kyawzazaw• 6 years ago

My school in the midwest USA will probably be using meet. As we already pay for gsuite.

hackbinary• 6 years ago

Gawd. Teams is so rubbish compared to Slack: - team channels are stuck in their own area away from DM and ad hoc group chats - content seems to disappear - downloading files, and in particular pictures, and then finding what it has been named and where it went is a nightmare.

solstice3• 6 years ago

I hope that this Corona virus epidemic is going to be the thing that finally pushes broadband expansion to the countryside in Germany...

chefkoch3• 6 years ago

As this is nothing you can change by pushing a button in your billing system i wouldn't hold my breath. But how much bandwith does in really need for remote work as a office worker? RDP should work ok over anything better than dial up.

solstice3• 6 years ago

I was thinking more about schools switching over to remote education like they currently do in China. I guess that this sort of app and video conferencing system is currently infeasible in the more rural parts of Germany due to lack of bandwidth.

animalnewbie• 6 years ago

Starlink I think is built specifically for that so you have a reason to be hopeful

OJFord• 6 years ago

I'm fairly concerned about SARS-CoV-2, and think it's going to be absolutely awful - but although it's already terrible in Italy I don't think it's yet terrible enough that I believe this is a genuine outpouring of moral solidarity. Maybe that doesn't matter, but my gut reaction is pretty far from 'oh that's jolly good of them'.

ganoushoreilly• 6 years ago

I got an email from Meraki today capitalizing on the virus, encouraging me to run a few demos of the teleworker units. The whole thing was about saving my employees from exposure.

It's absolutely gross.

mjburgess• 6 years ago

I don't quite get why it's gross.

Presumably you'd want to find wfm/etc. solutions ?

rwmurrayVT• 6 years ago

I saw a thread on r/sales asking how the virus was impacting people's quarters. There were several sales people reporting that their SaaS leads were coming in so quickly they were almost overwhelmed.

chenlianmt• 6 years ago

This is awesome for students from poorer districts who have no access to the internet when COVID-19 keeps them from school. A fairly good move for education equality. Besides, it would be better if free (cheap) tablets are also offered.

Amazon, Microsoft join Italy’s initiative to offer free Wi-Fi, eBooks

Related Stories