Syracuse officials have launched a new wireless community broadband network they hope will help bring affordable broadband access to the city of 145,000.

Dubbed Surge Link, the effort is backed by more than $3.5 million in federal funding and aims to deliver free broadband access to the city’s lowest income neighborhoods.

Motivated by peak pandemic connectivity headaches, Syracuse put out a request for proposal (RFP) late last year. The city then hired US Ignite as an advisor, and selected Geneva-based Community Broadband Networks (no relation to our program here at ILSR) to build a fixed wireless network capable of delivering discounted access starting with 2,500 underserved Syracuse households.

City officials tell ILSR the network is using Fixed Wireless Access technology, specifically Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which is an emerging technology a growing number of municipalities and other nonprofit community groups have been experimenting with as a way to bring broadband to unserved and underserved residents in dense settings. And while CBRS has promise, as US Ignite notes, “because the technology is relatively new, the hardware and software associated with CBRS networks is also new. Vendors may still be working out the kinks in their solutions, particularly if those solutions are being used in novel ways, or need to interface with other older systems.”

It should also be noted that another New York community (Westchester County) embraced CBRS, only to find that it could not deliver the capacity they wanted to many people who needed the service. 

Our new podcast series – Building for Digital Equity – debuts today with an insightful conversation with Margaret “Meg” Kaufer, President of the STEM Alliance in Westchester County, New York.

Meg shares lessons about what they have learned in delivering low-cost Internet access to people in Yonkers and beyond. She also discusses how they recently retired their wireless CBRS network and have embraced signing households up for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).

Our regular followers may recall her appearance on episode 500 of the Community Broadband Bits podcast where she discussed their foray into CBRS. On the B4DE podcast, she not only updates us on those efforts, but also explains how they have developed a replicable strategy for signing people up for the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), helping eligible participants navigate the cumbersome paperwork requirements.

The B4DE podcast features short interviews with our team, talking to those doing behind-the-scenes digital inclusion work through local efforts aimed at giving everyone, everywhere, the opportunity to participate fully in the digital world.

You can listen to the podcast below or put this feed into your podcast app. And don’t forget to visit our B4DE podcast page for this and future episodes. Please leave us a rating if you like it!

Header image of podcast microphone courtesy of Maciej Korsan, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)
Public Domain Dedication

In an effort to facilitate the deployment of innovative broadband solutions in underserved areas - both urban and rural - the nonprofit organization US Ignite recently partnered with National Science Foundation (NSF) and Schmidt Futures to launch ProjectOVERCOME. 

The Benton Institute released a report in November naming the seven communities that the project will focus on: Blue River, OR; Buffalo, NY; Cleveland, OH; Clinton City, MO; Detroit, MI;Loiza, Puerto Rico; and Yonkers, NY.

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In the report that was released, Benton spotlights each community and the technologies they will use. The technologies include Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), fiber, fixed wireless and hotspots. 

According to the initiative's guidelines, these communities were chosen because of how they vary in population, demographics, regions of the country, housing, and industry. The program will work with these communities to experiment in deploying innovative Internet connectivity solutions on a 12-month timeline. 

The projects will collectively result in not only education, outreach, and local broadband organizing development efforts, but provide direct connectivity to more than 700 households.

For example, in a CBRS deployment in New York,

While Cleveland was ranked one of worst-connected cities in America in 2019 by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), nonprofit, DigitalC is chipping away at this reputation with a fast-tracked initiative aimed at bringing affordable broadband to the people that need it. The nonprofit’s Wireless Internet Service Provider, EmpowerCLE+ launched in 2018 and quickly accelerated in 2020 in response to the pandemic. EmpowerCLE+ provides “fast, reliable Internet speeds for $18/month, and is hoping to double its capacity to 6,000 households in the coming year.

Currently, households are receiving service via a fiber-fed mesh millimeter wave network. The expansion will include additional fiber for Multi-Dwelling Units (MDUs) as well as new wireless deployments, including Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) network. The new CBRS expansion will help the network overcome geographical obstacles and bring additional service to homes it was not able to reach before with just millimeter wave technology.  

Connecting the Unconnected

According to DigitalC's website, the nonprofit came from OneCommunity, formerly known as OneCleveland and founded in 2003 to build a backbone fiber network connecting hospitals and other nonprofits throughout the metropolitan area. In 2014, OneCommunity sold its fiber assets to Everstream, a Cleveland-based ISP serving communities throughout the midwest and parts of the east coast with fast, reliable Internet through fiber.

In 2015, DigitalC was established to “make Greater Cleveland's digital future more equitable.” The nonprofit spent the last six years focused on connecting communities of color and immigrant communities that have experienced redlining in the city. 

When Collin Boyce, the City of Tucson’s Chief Information Officer, was a young boy, he left his native island country of Trinidad and Tobago with his mother and three brothers and moved to Brooklyn, New York.

“We were poor but what my mother did for us in the summertime is send us to computer camps. And because of those camps three of us are in the IT industry today and the one we call the black sheep of the family is a neurosurgeon,” Boyce said.

He was joking about his neurosurgeon brother of course. But was dead serious about how being introduced to computer technology as a young kid led him into IT work and why it means so much to him to help build Tucson’s new municipal wireless network to provide Internet connectivity for low-income school students and seniors.

“This effort is an opportunity to give back what my mother gave me,” he said.

Tucson has hundreds of miles of fiber connecting the city’s municipal buildings. But, unlike a city like Chattanooga, which operates one of the premier Fiber-to-the-Home networks in the nation allowing America’s first Gig City to provide free high-speed Internet access to 12,000 low-income students in Chattanooga throughout the ongoing pandemic, Tucson has not built a fully fiber-optic municipal broadband network.

As the COVID crisis swept across Arizona and forced students to attend school remotely last spring, Boyce began to look for a way to ensure that the thousands of students who didn’t have Internet access at home wouldn’t be left behind. In a city with a population of about 530,000, an estimated 30 percent of city residents, or about 150,000 Tucsonans, don’t subscribe to wireline broadband, Boyce said.

Standing Up a New Network

“We needed to stand up some wireless technology,” he told us this week.

Four times a week, from 1960 to 1968, a plane marked with the insignia of the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI) took off from the Purdue University Airport in West Lafayette, Indiana and flew a figure-eight pattern above Montpelier. At an altitude of 23,000 feet, the DC-6AB aircraft used onboard Stratovision to broadcast pre-recorded courses to schools in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. The 200-mile radius of the broadcast was estimated to cover 5 million students in 13,000 schools, though only about 1,800 schools became paying members.  

With seed money from the Ford Foundation, it sparked hope that the MPATI program, which predated widespread cable or satellite TV, would serve as a model for how educators could use the cutting-edge technology of the day to make top-flight education more accessible to students in rural America. The experiment lasted for eight years until the two-plane fleet was permanently grounded due to financial difficulties and, ironically, a National Association of Educational Broadcasters study that argued MPATI used too much of the UHF television spectrum.

Today, the Purdue Research Foundation's Innovation Partners Institute (IPI) has resurrected the spirit that gave wings to MPATI in an effort to reach students in the Kankakee Valley School Corporation with a pilot program of a different sort. Instead of using Stratovision and airplanes, IPI has partnered with Wabash College, SBA Communications, Watch Communications, and the State of Indiana to connect 500 households to a wireless broadband network in support of remote learning.

“I was tasked with leading the ‘Safe Campus’ initiative at Purdue (University) when Covid hit, which accelerated the potential of adapting new technology. What we realized is that when it comes to learning, especially in rural areas of Indiana, one in four students don’t have connectivity,” said David Broecker, Chief Innovation and Collaboration Officer at the Purdue Research Foundation, which manages Purdue’s Discovery Park District.