Designed and stood up multiple pilots bringing home internet access to the lowest-income areas of Jacksonville, working directly with city council members and state representatives to get them funded and sited. The architecture was owned end to end: the data flow, the fixed-wireless distribution modelled for coverage before a mast went up, and hardware mounted to reach where residents actually lived rather than wherever coverage already existed.
Site selection was built on demographic analysis rather than engineering convenience: 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 actually sustain educational internet access, available municipal vertical assets, and whether the wireless was feasible at all. Future hurricane shelter siting was a factor, so the same infrastructure would serve during an activation. The easiest zone to build was not the zone that needed it.
The network 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. Low-cost device programmes were evaluated as part of the architecture — One Laptop per Child, the Intel Classmate PC, Elonex ONE, the OpenBook Project and the VIA pc-1 initiative — along with the questions most pilots leave unanswered: who installs at a resident’s home, who maintains the core equipment, what number a constituent calls when it breaks, what the legal exposure is, and how the thing is sustained after the pilot ends.
Applied in
- Digital Divide Broadband PilotsHome internet for the lowest-income neighbourhoods of Jacksonville, sited by demographic need rather than engineering convenience.