APRA Award
We are happy to announce that we have been awarded an ARPA grant to deploy free public Wi-Fi to the rural unincorporated communities of Bodega, Bodega Bay, Forestville, Cazadero, Monte Rio, and Jenner.
For any of you who have visited the amazing hamlet of Guerneville in Sonoma County, where the wine country meets the redwoods, you quickly and rather rudely discover the lack of basic cellular service in the area. In June of this year, EQAC was awarded $30,000 in a TIF grant from Sonoma County to figure out how to deploy a free public Wi-Fi in the rural unincorporated community of Guerneville, CA. We did it and we proved that we could do it with a cost of $13 per resident per year for free equitable access to the Internet, this is an amazing ROI.
We were able to deploy 10 Cisco Meraki MR86 access points throughout downtown giving about 1.5 square miles of coverage, 5 of the access points are gateways while the other 5 are repeaters.
Now, residents and tourists alike can access the Internet, look up job and family services, and most of all, use Wi-Fi to make phone calls. People who can not afford any access now have it.
A significant feature of our network architecture is that one to two of the nodes will be Starlink powered by solar with a battery backup. Because most of rural California suffers through Public Safety Power Shutoff events, and will do so for the next decade, continued operation of communication is critical. This feature means that when there is no power, no cell, and no Comcast (or AT&T or Sonic), our network will still operate.
During the Walbridge and LNU fires of 2020 and 2021, all communications were down. Fire fighters couldn’t reach each other, evacuation information could not get out, and pockets of residents were left without any way to know what danger was coming or how to respond. During the pandemic, education took place online, yet whole communities are unable to get cell, wifi or broadband connectivity.
Our three pillars are: digital education and equitable access to the internet; disaster preparedness; and economic development.
With the ARPA grant, EQAC will now prove that we can scale this model to these other communities in Sonoma County, creating a gold standard that can be used across all of rural California.
Equitable access to the Internet is a critical component to rural broadband. Sadly, free public Wi-Fi networks such as these have been overlooked in the $6 Billion Rural Broadband legislation that Governor Newsom signed to help bridge the digital divide.
Currently free public Wi-Fi is defined as a public library. We are working now to lobby to get this changed and the proof is in the pudding as we bring online these rural and disadvantaged communities. Come to Guerneville and discover for yourself how critical the free public Wi-Fi is and how much of an impact it has made on people's lives.
#freepublicwifi #digitaldivide #ruralbroadband #equitableaccess #digitaleducation #safety #disasterpreparedness
