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Community Broadband & Digital Equity

Home internet for the lowest-income areas of Jacksonville — sited by demographic need rather than engineering convenience.

Also known as Digital Divide, Digital Equity, Municipal Broadband

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 9 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

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 modeled 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 programs 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

  • E-Rate Funded Network Programs2024–2026Roughly fifteen engagements across school districts, a regional education service agency and a public library consortium — every design constrained by federal funding eligibility and the funding-year window.
  • Public Access Wireless Program2005–2019Fourteen years and four program names — JaxWiz, municipal Wi-Fi, public wireless, Downtown Wi-Fi — from inheriting somebody else's pilot to a signed, mapped downtown build still being extended four years later.
  • Digital Divide Broadband Pilots2012–2017Home internet for the lowest-income neighborhoods of Jacksonville, sited by demographic need rather than engineering convenience.
  • Fiber Proximity Web Application2012–2016A mapping tool answering which municipal fiber ran near a given address across a 220-location plant — where the engineering was straightforward and the data was not.

Career

See also

Also searched as

  • digital equity
  • digital divide
  • broadband affordability
  • municipal broadband