Author
Erik Heinrich
Some great examples of this work include our Urban Wi-Fi project in India; Project Isizwe in South Africa; and our Powernet project in the U.S.—each of which helped deliver free Wi-Fi to tens of thousands of people, especially those in the most underserved areas. Our networks connect students to educational content and services, residents to public resources and jobs, businesses with online services, and communities with news and entertainment.
To CommScope, World Wi-Fi Day is a time to reflect on our progress toward the goal of ensuring better outcomes for the residents of underserved communities. We’ve improved millions of people’s lives by providing access to health, education, and public services through public Wi-Fi deployments in underprivileged and rural areas. We’ve created numerous jobs as a partner-first organization that brings value back to our partners with employment opportunities at each new project. And we’ve worked hand-in-hand with local communities not only to improve digital equity, but also to advance and usher in the next state-of-the-art generation of gigabit wireless services.
On World Wi-Fi Day, we weigh the value of our contributions by how we’re improving people’s lives in three major ways: connecting communities, building digital access for greater equity, and ensuring future readiness. The following highlights some contributions we’re proud to share from recent years:
Connecting Communities
We introduced Wi-Fi to more than 500 rural indigenous communities and tribal societies across Taiwan, bringing wireless access to remote areas—many for the first time—that allowed residents to strengthen familial and community ties across the main island’s mountainous areas and Orchid Island. Our networks created an important conduit for connecting these village communities with one another, enabling residents to tap into remote services like digital medicine, digital education and empowering local businesses to capitalize on tourism.
Building Digital Access for Equity
We helped the local school district and municipalities of Avondale, Ohio and Hidalgo, Texas improve digital equity for their students, residents, and workers by making free public Wi-Fi a reality. These rural communities, with hundreds of thousands of underserved residents, had extremely limited means of accessing basic services such as educational, occupational, and municipal resources—all exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both communities struggled to identify funding within their budgets for public Wi-Fi projects. For Avondale, we tapped into innovative funding models combining resources from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), school districts, and local non-profits to fund the community-wide Wi-Fi initiative. With Hidalgo, we leveraged federal relief funds to build out the network. Today, the free, safe, and reliable wireless broadband networks we created for both counties serve over a million residents, giving them much needed access to education, public services, and remote work.
Ensuring Future Readiness
We worked with two of the largest cities in the San Francisco Bay Area—San Leandro and San Jose—to advance their leadership in providing residents with fast, high-capacity public Wi-Fi. In San Leandro, we created a gigabit-ready 802.11ac Wi-Fi network in one of the most advanced metropolitan network deployments in the country. In San Jose, which is home to one of the nation’s first municipal outdoor Wi-Fi networks, we upgraded the Wi-Fi network in its downtown area as part of the city’s initiative to bolster future economic development, attract new businesses downtown, and efficiently deliver a new generation of city services—from Wi-Fi-enabled parking meters to streaming video.
Wi-Fi is not merely a basic necessity, but a means of upward mobility—one that remains unavailable to many, many people. We’re proud to partner with communities around the world to build local employment opportunities for our partners as we make this resource free and accessible to everyone. To find out more about how CommScope is bringing public Wi-Fi to more people in more places, please visit our website.
