Multiple pilots designed and stood up with city council members and state representatives, funded and sited through them.
Motorola Canopy fixed wireless off existing municipal towers — the same vertical assets carrying the public safety radio system — plus an 802.11a mesh at 5.8 GHz designed with Cisco Systems, with root access points on an anchor community building, mesh nodes on municipal light poles, backhaul from a city tower over licensed-exempt point-to-point bridges, and residential traffic tunnelled through the city firewall into a segregated educational-internet zone.
Site selection ran on demographic analysis: eleven candidate zones in one council district scored on child population, lack of prior exposure to technology, household income, the income threshold at which a family could sustain educational internet access, available municipal vertical assets, and wireless feasibility. Future hurricane shelter siting was a factor. The easiest zone to build was not the zone that needed it.
The build was paired with low-cost and donated computers, because a signal reaching a house is not access if nobody inside it has a device.
Outcome
Residents online with devices in hand, on infrastructure the city already owned, in the neighbourhoods that needed it rather than the ones easiest to build.