The Broadband Lifeline in a Pandemic: How Your Community Can Quickly Connect the Unconnected

As the nation prepares to ride out a pandemic that will persist for months, the need is acute for fast and inexpensive broadband rollout. It’s important to know that you have options to deploy new facilities – options that can be exercised in days or weeks, not years. Last week, we shared some ideas for using fiber, mmWave, and Wi-Fi to get services to the unserved. April 2, we’d like to share more detail for how you can connect 1,000 or more households in a town or city for less than $500,000, possibly considerably less. These rapid deployments would be engineered to provide broadband speeds (at least 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload) using backbone fiber, point-to-point wireless, and Wi-Fi solutions. Every building or development will require custom analysis and design, but here we generalize for three development scenarios: small multi-family buildings, closely spaced single-family homes, and large apartment buildings.

• Scenario 1: Free connectivity to small multi-family buildings
• Scenario 2: Free connectivity to single-family homes in a neighborhood
• Scenario 3: Free connectivity to larger multi-family buildings in an urban area