Because our government has sold our bandwidth to comms corporations, who are interested in making money out of it rather than providing a service. Nonetheless several zillion of them are going to landfill, perfectly usable, socketted in old printers and motherboards, and they're useful for doing things like filling 'em full of free code for the purpose of ethernet booting of diskless computers. My main customer is Ken Yap who will fill these with Etherboot or other code and give 'em to you for a teensy fee. Mail predator if ya need some free eproms sent to you for the cost of postage. Although people can dialup or visit us on the net, if you don't have a modem you're stuck out in the cold.
Plans are afoot to grace more publicly accessible places with net access nodes.
A whole new range of info and discussion becomes sustainable with more access points and more people participating online. This relates to the dormant idea to become a computer recycling node. Further growth invovles reaching out to groups and helping get their info onto hot web pages. Because we run our own server, it's easy to add robots to these sites, eg. To make things easier, we try and provide a memory for these discussions with running archive pages.