We are working to access various funding sources from local, county, and state, including the California Rural Broadband funding initiatives. Our master plan is to continue expanding across all of Sonoma County, our neighboring countries starting with Mendocino, Napa, Lake, and even Marin, and ultimately across Northern California, and then all of rural California.
While there is an initial capital investment for this project for the Cisco Meraki network equipment, these enterprise and industrial grade access points are rated for a 20 year life and rarely suffer any mechanical issue. Once installed, the majority of the operating costs is simply paying the Internet Service Provider (e.g. Comcast) the monthly fees for Internet service. It is very unfortunate that NONE of the ISP’s offer discounted prices for community based resources like this project and expect the government to finance this.
We are looking forward to when Open Access can provide opportunities for community based projects like ours to leverage this to provide better connectivity at cost.