 Well, good morning. Good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2015 webinar series. Today's webinar will focus on Bridging the Digital Divide in the Developed World. We developed this webinar in collaboration with Dr. Jenna Burrell of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. My name is Holly Schneider-Brown, and I will be one of the moderators for today's webinar, along with Dr. Curtis Heimerl, a postdoctoral researcher of UC Berkeley's tier group. When I'm not doing this, I work with IEEE, where I am senior manager of humanitarian activities. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, Bridging the Digital Divide in the Developed World. Even now, not everyone has reliable, high-quality access to the Internet in the United States. Certain subgroups struggle to gain or maintain access and to make good use of the Internet. In particular, inhabitants of rural areas, non-native English speakers, and low-income households disproportionately lack access. At the same time, the contents and bandwidth demands of the Internet are changing. While a T1 line, 1.5 MBPS, or a satellite connection, was once more than sufficient, new Internet offerings such as streaming video, video conferencing, and cloud-based services require high bandwidth, low latency, and reliable connectivity. Job applications, government services, and many cost-saving tools and services are often provided primarily or only through the Internet as businesses, government agencies, and other organizations increasingly assume that everyone is on the Internet. To cover this topic, we've invited an expert in this field, Dr. Jenna Burrell, to join us. She is joined by another communications specialist, Dr. Curtis Heimerl. Welcome, and thank you both for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series generally, Yana Aranda, Michael Mater of ASMA, and myself, Jackie Halliday and Steve Welch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact them via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenter, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of nearly 900,000 people, such as engineers, technologists, and representatives from NGOs and social scientists working to solve quality-of-life challenges faced by underserved communities worldwide, such as access to potable water and electricity, effective healthcare, improved agriculture and sanitation, just to name a few. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and information from the members of our coalition, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, www.engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the E4C webinar series, a free, publicly available series of online seminars showcasing the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archived videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinars page, www.engineeringforchange-webinars.org. If you're following us on Twitter, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, and E4C webinars. E4C's next webinar will be on July 29th at 11 a.m. EDT, and our topic will be Jobs for Change, Engineers Without Borders Around the Globe. Check out the E4C webinars page for updates on our speakers and registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation to the webinar directly. Two housekeeping items before we get started. First, let's see where everyone is from. In the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, please type your location. If the chat is not open, you can access it by clicking the chat icon in the top right corner of your screen. At the bottom of the chat window, you'll find a drop-down list. Make sure you have all participants selected. Any technical questions or administrative problems should go into the chat window. Feel free to send a private chat to Engineering for Change admin if you have any issues. You can also use the chat window to type any remarks you may have. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, located below the chat, to type in your questions for the presenter. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting Stop and then Start. If that does not work, you may also want to try opening WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar to request a Certificate of Completion showing one professional development hour, PDH, for the session, please follow the instructions on the top of the E4C webinars website. It's now my pleasure to introduce our moderator, Dr. Curtis Heimerl. Dr. Heimerl is a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, Berkeley's tier group, as well as a co-founder of Endega. Curtis received his BS in computer engineering from the University of Washington and his MS and PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley under professors Eric Brewer and Tapan Parikh. Curtis' research focuses on enabling rural cellular access through empowering local entrepreneurs to set up and manage their own community cellular networks, for which he was named Technology Review's 2014 list of 35 under 35 innovators. Curtis has previously worked on education, MetaMouse, a system for converting single player education games into multiplayer games, and crowdsourcing, UMATI, the crowdsourcing vending machine. So without further ado, Curtis. Good morning, everybody, or evening depending on the wide variety of areas that we're at. So I don't want to take too much of Jenna's time. Jenna's obviously going to be the speaker here. I'll make sure that slide moved out and I'll lead into Jenna here. So Jenna's an associate professor at UC Berkeley, and the School of Information has been a mentor of mine in my eight years at Berkeley, where she was on my thesis committee, led me into the space out of technology directly and into the sort of ethnographic pieces of all of this, which have been hugely influential in my work, and super valuable in everything that we've been able to do, both as researchers and entrepreneurs at Indaga. I think this is going to be really interesting to talk, and I will hand it over to Jenna. Great. Thanks, Curtis. Yeah, so let me just give you a little brief on my background. So my bio says most of the information that's relevant. I have a PhD in sociology, but what I didn't include in my bio is that I actually have an undergraduate degree in computer science. I have a bit of a technical background, which I've enhanced, I would say, with training in sociology. And what I'm going to be talking about today, we can call it the digital divide. I tend not to favor that particular metaphor, partly because it sets us up to think of it as a binary, and what we really see with connectivity is kind of a range of practices, a range of types of access. I think more straightforwardly, we could call this, it's a talk about who still isn't connected to the Internet, and maybe more importantly, who still isn't benefiting fully from it. And why is that, and what can we do about it? So I've taken the liberty to sort of retitle the talk, and I've retitled it, Remaining Barriers to Digital Connectivity in the USA. USA, obviously, is part of what we conventionally think of as the developed world. Many people are connecting from other parts of the developed world, so it'll be interesting to see how research in the USA might relate to other parts of the developed world. I can't speak very authoritatively on that. So what I can say about my own research, you know, for many, many years, the past 10 years, I've primarily been focusing on connectivity, digital technology use in the developing world, and specifically in Sub-Saharan Africa. So I spent initially nine months living in Ghana, and then another six years kind of going back and forth, looking at Internet cafes and youth culture. I'm in the very early stages now of sort of shifting my research, or maybe the term people use now is pivoting, to look at issues of digital inequality in this country. And so I will start to talk with the caveat that my own research in this space is in the very early stages. Fortunately, many other people have been working on this question of the digital divide or digital inequality or barriers to digital connectivity, so I'm relying pretty heavily on some of that existing research. One resource I would point out right off the bat, which I'm going to be drawing from in this talk is the Pew Internet and American Life project. They've been doing surveys for decades now, and I'll be using some of their data to give you kind of a big picture of what's going on. Okay, so moving on to my first slide. So these are statistics collected by the Pew Internet and American Life project. They do phone-based surveys that are nationally representative, and they've been surveying people, you know, going all the way back to the 90s. And this graph shows us the percentage of U.S. adults online. What to make of this kind of a graph, you know, the premise of this talk is that people are not connected. There's people who are still not connected in this country, but this graph suggests that, you know, the people who are not connected are a very tiny minority. So back in the mid-90s, it was, you know, one quarter of Americans, around 25%, were on the Internet, you know, a minority of the national population. But now the percentage of U.S. adults who are online is all the way up to 85%. So, you know, if we're talking about the digital divide, do we consider this a problem solved? I obviously don't think that the conclusion to draw would probably end the talk with this slide, and we don't move on. I want to actually raise a few questions starting from this slide. One question you should be thinking about is quality of access. So this is U.S. adults who are online. That could include someone who once in a while goes to the library to use the Internet. This could include people who primarily use the Internet from a smartphone. If we're talking about quality of access, then we should be asking the question of people who have high-speed broadband connections have home connections. And I'll move on to the next slide in a minute to talk about that. The second question to consider is what is the composition of this 15% of the not connected population and also the composition of the population that doesn't have a good quality connection? There are certain populations that disproportionately do not have quality access, which I'll get to in a minute. The other thing I would point out, so, you know, 95, 96, up through 2000, what the Internet was is, you know, really different from what the Internet is today. So we should remember looking at a chart like this that the Internet itself is not a fixed entity, and what we're talking about today, what defines kind of a quality connection, is one that can support some of the present day uses of the Internet that are really becoming very dominant. So streaming video, video conferencing, you know, attending webinars like we're doing right now. And much of the Internet is, you know, increasingly has these sort of built-in assumptions about users' connectivity. So for example, Windows Update, I think is a really interesting case. So you get these kind of updates, software updates pushed to your computer, and you need to have a pretty fast connection and, you know, no data caps or anything like that to be able to download those software updates. That I found in Sub-Saharan Africa was a really critical problem. You know, those updates would kind of crash a computer. They couldn't be downloaded. They couldn't be installed. There were all sorts of network security problems with computers that weren't installing the updates. So that's sort of in summary that's a point to keep in mind that the Internet is continually changing. And then the final point I want to raise, which I'll get to in a minute, is that as a technology like the Internet becomes ubiquitous, as most Americans, 85% are online or a smaller percentage have good home connections, that means that being a non-user is a more and more disabling condition because often the alternatives go away. And I'll talk about that at length in a minute. Okay, so moving on to the next slide. This graph also from the Pew Internet and American Life Project from the same 2012 study helps us to see a little bit more clearly the breakdown in terms of income groups and in terms of quality of access. So if you look at adults in these different income groups who have access to the Internet, it's pretty high. So certainly among high-income groups, practically everyone has some sort of Internet access. But if you actually look at who has a home high-speed broadband connection, there's a really kind of dramatic difference between the low-income groups and the higher-income groups. So this is not surprising that, particularly for low-income groups, also for households where people have less education, for rural communities and for older people, connectivity is, those are some of the sub-populations that have disproportionately less access than others. And one thing I'd point out about that is that these are often populations, low-income populations, low-educations, people with low education that are disadvantaged by virtue of that fact and not having Internet access sort of compound some of those disadvantages. Okay, so what I'm going to talk about, people have been talking about the digital divide for a long time, for, you know, a couple of decades. And what I want to talk about today are some of the present-day issues that are the most significant, I think, some of the most contemporary issues around what we talk about as the digital divide. So I'm going to start by talking about the trend towards smartphones as the primary point of access. I'm going to then move on and talk about what it means to be disconnected for urban populations. And these first two issues I'm going to try and get through pretty quickly because what I really want to spend time on is the third issue, which is disconnected populations in rural areas. And I'm going to spend some time talking about a case study, a wireless ISP that started up about nine months ago in Mendocino County here in California. And the CEO of this ISP, Yohel Ben-David, is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. He's been really helpful in sort of giving me a chance to see from the inside out exactly how this wireless ISP works. And I'm going to try and talk at length about that as a case study. And in both the urban and kind of rural context I have new projects where I'm getting just kind of a sense from this early work that I'm doing, some of its interview-based observations of what some of the key issues may be. And I'll try to be very specific about what I think are the research questions to be answered and much of what I have now are questions to be answered and not so much key findings. Okay, so starting with this first issue, there's a really interesting trend where we're seeing that for certain populations the primary point of access to the Internet is from a smartphone. And that I think is a trend that has widely been celebrated. And without adequately noting that there are some limitations to that trend, the capacity for smartphones to quote-unquote bridge the digital divide. So looking at another table from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, in this 2012 project they really drew out exactly what this trend looks like and broke it down by, you know, gender, race, age groups. So just to kind of walk you through this table, there's a column that shows the percentage of people they surveyed who have broadband at home. And you can see some pretty significant differences between, not between gender, that's pretty much equal, but between different racial ethnic groups. So white households or white survey respondents, 74% have broadband at home whereas black respondents, 64% have broadband and for Hispanic survey respondents only 53% have broadband at home. If you then ask the question who has home broadband or a smartphone, the percentages go up for all categories. But what's really interesting is that they go up, especially for ethnic minority groups. So there's a little circle that will highlight those differences. So there's a 15-point difference between black survey respondents who have broadband at home and who have broadband or smartphone. That means that there's a pretty significant population that is primarily connecting to the Internet at home from a smartphone using cell networks. And an even bigger proportion of the Hispanic population that is doing that. There's also a trend you can see for young people. So in the 18- to 29-age category, there's a 15-point spread between people who have broadband at home and people who are connecting primarily through smartphones to the Internet. I'll just point out that this is not controlled for income or education levels. So that also figures into these differences. Okay, so another look at how this breaks down for populations, for survey respondents with lesser educational attainment, you can also see that many of those survey respondents are connecting to the Internet primarily by smartphone and don't have home broadband connections. If you just think about the economics of it, if people with lesser educational attainment often earn less income and the expense of having both a smartphone and phone subscription, as well as a home Internet connection, that's a big expense. And so when people are putting under economic pressure, often they choose the phone over the home broadband connection. So I mentioned that this has often been widely celebrated, and I just want to point to a few issues that I think we should consider if we're talking about people who are primarily accessing the Internet by smartphone. You know, many people are talking about the Internet as an important place for individuals to have a voice to participate in our democracy, to communicate with political representatives, to discuss issues, to voice their own experiences. And certainly there's a big difference between the capacity to do digital production, authoring, or even, you know, kind of more sophisticated things like web publishing or writing code. Doing that on a smartphone is, you know, for many of those activities it's not possible. So if part of the digital divide is a matter of producing content, not just consuming it, having a smartphone as your primary point of access to the Internet can be really disabling. The other thing to consider in a more practical sense is the issue of how accessible online services are from smartphones. So I'm sure many people listening in have had the experience where you start filling out a form on your phone, and it's just too difficult or it's impossible or the form isn't designed to really work on a smartphone, so you give up and you switch to your laptop. Imagine if you don't have a laptop, if you don't have a home Internet connection. The accessibility of online services, I think in particular government services, where there is, you know, a mandate to serve the public, you know, how accessible are those forms and services from smartphones? That's a question to ask. And I, you know, I've been wondering whether there is any kind of requirement or legislation that, you know, given how many people are now connecting to the Internet primarily from smartphones to ensure that they're able to do things that are critical to their life opportunities, things like applying for a job, for example. And then finally, you know, if you're primarily connecting to the Internet, if your primary computing device is a smartphone, how much practice are you maybe getting with a keyboard and a mouse? And if you're not getting practice with those devices, you know, is that going to be a problem if you try and switch to a traditional keyboard or a traditional desktop or laptop computer? Okay. Moving on pretty quickly from there. So I have a new project I've started very early stages, though some of this is just kind of nodding to issues that I hope others will look into a little bit more deeply and that I hope to have more concrete answers for in the future. And the project I've started is in Richmond, California. I'm working with a nonprofit there that works with low-income families. And they've been addressing digital literacy issues for a long time. The questions that I have are around technology use in families and also technology in the schools. And to sort of give a high-level picture of what I think is going on, some of this is not really specific to the urban, but, you know, points to some general issues around why people are not connected to the Internet. And this is drawn also from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. So one of the survey questions they asked, asked people to indicate the primary reason that they don't use the Internet. And this is a breakdown of sort of the categories of reasons. So this was, it was not a multiple-choice response. They had to pick one, you know, the one primary reason why they don't use the Internet. And you can break down the responses into these four categories. So relevance, you know, the category of relevance. They're not interested. They think it's a waste of time. They're too busy. I think that the really, you know, I do qualitative research and I think that as a survey question, that is there's a lot there to investigate. What does it mean for someone to say they're not interested in the Internet? Do they not? Are there things there that are relevant that they don't know about? You know, what is, what does that really mean? But that's the major category of responses had to do with relevance. The next category, which I think will come as no surprise is usability. So one thing, you know, to think about it, kind of looking at the history of technologies is that the Internet is, it's not like, for example, the telephone. Gaining the ability to use the Internet is not a trivial activity. It's not a trivial task. Learning how to search, like a keyword-based search, that's a skill. Being able to navigate a graphical user interface and understand how menus work, all of that actually requires a pretty significant amount of time and effort to master. It's often easy for those of us who've been on computers for practically our entire lives to recall that a lot of what, you know, composes computing technologies and a lot of the Internet is just not kind of easy to make sense of if you're new to it. And that turned out to be one major category of barrier for survey respondents. So usability, it's hard to figure out. It's, they don't know how to use it. They are worried about the risks, things like viruses or spam or scams or hackers. And then the third category of reasons also should not come as a surprise price. It's too expensive. So in urban areas are served by the major incumbent operators like Comcast and AT&T, but just because you can purchase a service doesn't mean you can afford to. And that is certainly a barrier for people in urban areas. Finally, the last category relates to, you know, separately from price, is there Internet service available? That's a question that is actually still relevant and something to be considered in rural areas in this country. I'm going to talk about that at length, so I won't go into it in too much detail, but if you live in an area with, you know, low population density, you may have few or no choices for high-quality, high-speed broadband connectivity. It's a smaller proportion of the total category of reasons for not using the Internet, but it's an important one. Okay, so this slide I'm going to just say right up front is a bit speculative, but let me just start by saying this. You know, if you don't have a home broadband connection, if you're in that, you know, if you're in a low-income group and you're in that, you know, 50 percent, that doesn't have a home broadband connection because it's not affordable, or if you just have a smart phone to access the Internet, and you need to, say, compose a resume or submit a job application, what do you do? You probably go to the library. That's where many people get free access to the Internet. I have students who are part of a qualitative research course that I teach who are doing observations in libraries and another student who is actually working as a docent in the Oakland Public Library system, helping people use the computers. And their observations suggest that, you know, those resources are very well used, that there are people sitting in front of computers and there are people waiting in line and there are time limits on use as well, so you can only, you know, book a computer, especially when it's busy at the Oakland Public Library system, for one hour. So if you don't regularly use a desktop or laptop computer, that hour can go really quickly. You know, navigating through web pages, using a mouse, dealing with a graphically user interface, those activities take a lot longer if you're not well-practiced with the technology. So from what these students are observing, it does seem that the public access facilities that are available are not sufficient in certain ways. So there's a sociologist who is at Santa Clara University, Laura Robinson, who's looked at, comparatively, at young people with different qualities of Internet access and has found that comparing high school students, for example, who have the Internet at home with high school students who have to travel somewhere to use the Internet, the information literacy skills they develop are very different. She calls this a taste for the necessary. The students who have poor quality access who have to travel somewhere, they develop a taste for the necessary, meaning that they don't really develop the kind of critical skills of evaluating sources and comparing, thinking critically about the information they're finding on the Internet. They're simply kind of asking questions and finding answers and completing their homework. And that relates to the quality of access. So time-limited use of computers can be frustrating for people. The skills that they develop can be limited. This is kind of a research question. To what extent are public access facilities in this country sufficient? To what extent are they overburdened in areas with high population, like Oakland, California, urban centers that also have high rates of families that are not connected that don't have home broadband connections. One would expect that those facilities would be very heavily used and perhaps insufficient for developing some of these better skills with the Internet. Okay, moving on to the next slide. This is something that we've learned from the history of technology. Claude Fisher, who's a sociologist here at UC Berkeley, wrote a really interesting book called America Calling, which is about the history of the telephone in the USA, Landline Telephones. And one thing he points out is that with the rise towards ubiquity of a technology, the alternatives, you know, what people use to communicate go away. And he points to a number of technologies. So for example, as people start adopting the refrigerator, the alternatives, you know, door-to-door vegetable peddlers, the ice man who brings ice for your ice box, inexpensive food delivery, all that infrastructure goes away. With the rise of the mobile phone, I think we've seen this over, you know, the course of our lifetimes, one-by-one public pay phones are disappearing, which is, you know, an interesting phenomenon to think about. So, you know, if you have a situation, as we do in this country, where 85% of people use the Internet or 70% of, you know, adults in the U.S. have home broadband connections, the pressure on people who aren't connected increases. It's a worse situation to be in now than it was 10 years ago. So for example, you know, if you need to apply for a job, for example, it may be necessary to do that online. And 10 years ago, maybe it wouldn't be. I have a specific story that relates to this. So related to my project in Richmond, California, I was attending a meeting of the Technology Subcommittee for one of the school districts in the area. And a teacher who teaches computer classes spoke about how they've managed to get every class to come into the computer lab for 30 to 45 minutes every week, every class in the school from kindergarten on up. And they do two things in this 30 to 45-minute period. They do keyboarding. They use something called typing web to try and reach a word per minute goal of 15 words per minute. And they use something called mini-mouse for the kindergarteners and first graders to help them gain mouse control skills. After the meeting, I asked some people about this because I thought, this sounds crazy. I mean, of all the creative things you could do on a computer, why are they having little kids learn how to type and use the mouse? It seems sort of uncreative. And someone pointed out to me that it's for standardized testing. With the rollout of the common core standards, all standardized testing is going online. So kids who are going to be tested, it's no more pen and paper tests. They're using these adaptive tests. And kids who don't have computers at home can't practice with keyboard and mouse. And that, that ability with the computer could interfere with the ability to assess what they've learned. I think that's a really powerful illustration from option to requirement, as a technology becomes ubiquitous. Not being a user can in many different ways be really disabling. Okay, so now I want to move on to the final section of my talk, talking about disconnectedness in rural areas. This is a photo of the Point Arena Lighthouse. This is the area where the further reach network, which is the case study I'm going to talk about, operates. And many of the things that I've already talked about, things like affordability, things like usability and things like relevance, those all certainly apply in rural areas, as well as in urban areas. But the added complication in rural areas is many places, as I've already sort of noted, just don't have service. They don't have options for connecting to high-speed broadband internet. Why is this? It's because the population density is low, income is often not very high, and for big-income and operators like AT&T and Comcast, there's just not a strong business case for serving these areas. Could that issue be tackled? There are a couple of ways. One is through policy. And there is this kind of tradition established in this country for telephone service. There's something called the Universal Service Fund, which has been in place for many, many years, decades and decades. And you see the evidence of this as a surcharge on your phone bill. The motivation behind the Universal Service Fund was to ensure that telephone connectivity, telephone infrastructure was provided even, because it's such a critical communication tool, that it's provided even in areas where there isn't a strong business case. So that includes these rural areas with low population density. The Universal Service Fund does not extend to broadband internet access at this time. But what are ways in which policy might show that this critical resource is provided in areas like rural Mendocino County? The other way to tackle this, possibly, is through technological innovations. So are there ways to build that infrastructure to provide internet access that can be much less expensive? And I'm going to be talking about a case that attempts to do this, to handle the cost issue, the business case issue, through technological innovation. So further reach is the network I'm talking about. They are a wireless internet service provider. Also, these are also referred to as WISPs. That's been operational for about nine months in Mendocino County, in the areas of Manchester, California, Point Arena, or else. Those are the primary areas. They're extending to Guilala. They're extending north to Albion. So they're growing. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the technology. Given the audience engineers for change, I assume people are very interested in this question. So I've been trying to make sure I'm very read up on this. I have a technical background, but it wasn't in networking. Luckily, Curtis, our moderator, is in the space, where I'm not able to answer questions he might be able to. So further reach is a project of the DeNovo Group, which is a 501c3 nonprofit. And I think that's an interesting thing to think about. ISPs that operate as nonprofits. They offer a low-cost infrastructure for providing internet service, specifically in rural areas. And this infrastructure is a fixed wireless network. It's operating on unlicensed spectrum, so that includes frequencies 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz. And it's the same, you know, in some sense, it's the same type of Wi-Fi that you might have in your house. But this wireless infrastructure, this Wi-Fi network is adapted to be built out in the outdoors and to cover long distances. So this picture that you can see on the slide shows some of their high-gain directional antennas. These are used to amplify signal strength to project data across really long distances, miles and miles and miles. And there's a set of core relay sites like these antennas that are along the coast. And customers connect to one of the relay sites using an antenna that's mounted on their house. It has to be line of sight. They're highly directional antennas, so you have to have line of sight with one of these relay sites. And the bandwidth that the core relay sites, such as this one that's illustrated, that it can carry, it can be over 100 megabits per second. I don't actually know if there's an upper maximum or exactly what that would be, but that's a lot of bandwidth that it can carry. One critical manner for any with wireless ISP like further reach is the question of upstream bandwidth. I'm not going to say anything about that at the moment, but I'll say more in a minute. So where does the bandwidth come from? You can set up a nice network with antennas and have everyone connected, but what's feeding that network is a critical question. So what makes this network low-cost? The fact that it's wireless makes it low-cost. So digging trenches, laying cable, that is really expensive. Fiber optic cable is not cheap. So just going wireless is one way to reduce costs pretty radically. They're also using unlicensed spectrums, so the big incumbent operators buy spectrum. They participate in these spectrum auctions that the FCC does every now and then, and that's expensive. Buying into that requires really deep pockets. They use off-the-shelf hardware. Ubiquity is a hardware provider in this space that provides a lot of useful equipment for setting up these fixed wireless networks and targets this kind of market. And they don't use big, expensive towers. They use the environment sort of opportunistically. So you can see here this is an antenna set up way high up on a hill. It's on kind of a short pole. They can use hills. They can use buildings. One interesting thing I found about this network is they use scavenged infrastructure, so towers left behind by PG&E, for example. And also the operating on this unlicensed spectrum, the kind of requirements for this type of wireless are low-power, so it's also a low-power network. To also lower costs, they have built a lot of interesting custom software, and the efforts around that are, you know, especially around reducing labor costs. They'll be able to remotely manage the network, troubleshoot remotely, reboot equipment remotely. FYI, a lot of that software is open source. Okay. So I said I would talk about the upstream bandwidth. What is supplying this network that serves the whole further reach subscriber base? The upstream bandwidth comes from a Level 3 data center. Level 3 is a Tier 1 provider. They're located in Manchester, California. I don't know if that's a very small town. Manchester is a very small coastal town. I don't know if anyone on the call, if that's a meaningful place, but it has long been since the 50s a cable landing site, first for coaxial cable, and now for trans-specific fiber optic cables that connect to Japan and Hawaii, connect the West Coast to Japan and Hawaii. So there is a lot of capacity running through this very small rural town. By and large, the fiber optic cables, you know, land in Manchester, and then go straight to San Francisco, rarely has anyone been able to tap into that infrastructure to serve the communities that are in the immediate vicinity. Further reach managed to get Level 3 to sell bandwidth to their puny little local startup ISP. They had to buy more than they wanted, but they got it at wholesale prices, so it was a really kind of a big coup. Let me just show you. So this is Manchester, California. And these are some of the sub-oceanic fiber optic cables that run to the West Coast. From this picture, it kind of looks like there are a lot of them, but kind of worldwide, there are not too many of these cable landing stations. Related to, you know, rural areas, and so here's a picture of the cable landing station. I was driving to the beach and I ran across it, so there's a sign to the beach, and right behind it is the Manchester cable landing station. Okay, so I wanted to just talk for a minute about sort of the local understanding about this cable landing site. You know, from interviewing people, I've heard many people mention, you know, the projects around laying fiber optic cable in the area, projects which seem to be, you know, going on in one place or another much of the time, and the frustration with not being able to tap into any of that infrastructure. So people talked about their roads being torn up, you know, traffic jams waiting for construction work, you know, and traffic jams in a little town like this are sort of a big deal. I've been finding lots of things in the local newspapers that refer to this problem. This is actually a political cartoon from 2013 published in the local newspaper, The Independent Coast Observer. You know, it's talking about not having access to this infrastructure, the figures in the political cartoon say, it's a crime that we don't have high-speed Internet on the coast. It's time to get mad. Sure, there have been baby sets, but they ruined our roads with the fiber optic lines, and we got nothing out of it, not even DSL. The economic future of the coast depends on the Internet folks, so let's make some noise. Let's put ourselves on AT&T's must deal with map. Continually, as I'm talking to people, I hear, you know, stories. Sometimes it's just a mention that people know that these fiber optic cables are being laid nearby and that they're not getting access to it. There was a local public radio station episode on the rural digital divide, and a local assembly member, Jim Wood, talked about this phenomenon he described it this way. Having that amazing pipeline sitting there near Manchester is like having a candy store with huge windows and all the residents outside wanting to get in and get a piece of it and being told, no way, you're not coming into my store. It's astounding that the basic resource we need, and we can't get ahold of it. And this, I think, is actually a not unusual situation for rural areas to actually kind of host some of this infrastructure but not have access to it. I talked a little bit about the technology that makes low-cost Internet access possible, but, you know, the story of further reach, the actual story about getting this network up and running goes way beyond questions of, you know, figuring out the technology. And this is from a report on the project where they set up progress support. Our biggest challenge has been the amount of time required to negotiate land and facility use for relays with residents, public facilities, and businesses. So a lot of the work here is not especially technological. It's, you know, related to policy issues. It's related to community politics. Setting up these relay sites requires, you know, finding a spot that's ideal topographically, so on a hill. And that then involves negotiating with landowners to get permission, finding the right incentives to, you know, get those landowners to participate. Sometimes those incentives include giving them free Internet access. And there are a number of interesting policy issues. So at the federal level, you know, the FCC wants to incentivize this kind of technological innovation, but their efforts to do so have been sort of mixed. So for example, they had something called the rural broadband experiments, which were specifically meant to fund exactly this kind of innovative technological work to serve rural areas. But, you know, at the federal level, there's sort of an ingrained government type of risk aversion. As stewards of public funding, they are very hesitant to sort of hand over funds to unproven, you know, upstart tech innovators. There are issues at the sort of state and local level around getting permits for the towers. There are issues around community politics, so, you know, it's not just a matter of getting a landowner to buy into it. Often there's sort of community relationships among people in the community that can get in the way of these efforts. In this particular part of California, there's also not as much of this as there once was apparently, but there's sort of anti-wireless people, so people who are really concerned about the safety of the technology and don't want wireless to, you know, quote-unquote, blank at the area because the spheres are on safety problems. And then finally, this is sort of the area where there are lots of questions still to be answered. How do we make sure these networks are sustainable? How do we make sure that they continue to exist into the future? Many wireless ISPs, like for the Reach, are sort of mom-and-pop operations. There was a famous case in this area, a wireless ISP called Esplanade, which folded, and partly because the co-founders of the ISP got divorced. So, you know, a kind of small mom-and-pop operation is vulnerable to kind of collapsing for reasons that don't necessarily have to do with the business. And that they can do with kind of interpersonal issues. Community-owned networks is another model, which I'm just starting to look into. Many people are really passionate about that idea, so I can point people towards resources if you'd like to learn more about that. Okay, so this is my, almost my last slide. I've been doing interviews over the last six months or so whenever I can get up to the area, just finding out what the Internet experience is for people in this particular rural area. And finding out what the options are. So, many people, if they're not on this nice new fast Internet service for the reach, they have been using satellite connections. Some people have been using T1 lines that used to be, you know, blazing fast. 1.5 megabits per second these days is really slow. And T1 lines are really expensive, so it can be like $400 or $500 a month. Some people are even still using dial-up. Some people may have DSL service, but it's often very slow. There are other wireless ISPs in the area. Fact of life for almost all of these services, generally they have data caps, so you can only download so much data over the course of a month. People I've talked to regularly go over those limits and come up with these ways, these strategies for dealing with those limitations. So, they will, you know, go to the library if they need to do something. The library has a different kind of connection. So, go to a different place to get a better connection. They will set up, often some of these services have hours, usually like two to six in the morning, where the data is not capped. So, they'll set up automated download software to download things, or they'll even stay up until the wee hours of the morning to use the Internet without those data constraints. Satellite has big latency issues. So, for a lot of things people do on the Internet now, like videoconferencing, you know, satellite really doesn't work well. So, I think a question that I wanted to answer, which I'm sort of making some progress on, is why does Internet access matter specifically in rural areas? And some of the answer to that question has to do with how people manage to sort of eke out on existing, make a living in these areas. There aren't, you know, lots of jobs. Someone told me, you know, you don't come here and walk into a $100,000 a year job. So, people get creative. They piece together an income. They become self-employed. Tourism is big in this area, so the Internet can be really critical for teleworking. If you're coming from an urban area, perhaps you can continue to work for your old employer, but connect through the Internet, and obviously the quality of your connection will affect whether you can do that very well. If you're in tourism, finding, you know, customers, some people are even telecommuting, so actually connecting to a physical site from their Internet connections at their home. So that's all in the category of making a living. Additionally, this is something I just have a few insights into community issues around community support. So, you know, there are not so many kind of social institutions available locally, and people organize themselves to provide for some of those needs. I think health is an interesting example. So this particular area, there are a lot of retirees, and so the population in Encino County and along the coast is really aging. One person told me that to get to a health clinic, you have to drive about 40 minutes, and in the case of an emergency, many people depend on being, you know, life-flighted out of the area, and in fact, you can subscribe to helicopter life-flight service for $50 a month. If you have a spouse who has a health crisis and ends up in the hospital, and that is, you know, several hours' drive away, that can be a real challenge. So in one case, one of the people we interviewed, they'd organized a Google doc, a Google spreadsheet to schedule people to drive, you know, a woman in the area to see her husband at the hospital, and they had, you know, there's a little bit of an element of the Internet making that a little easier to do. Okay, so in conclusion, I want to make sure we have time for questions. In this day and age, certainly the quality of the Internet connection matters, the quality meaning how fast it is, whether it's, you know, a connection you have at home, it's not something where you are capped as far as how many hours you can use it, like is the case in many public access facilities. The Internet is changing. So it's, you know, it's a continually moving target. What, you know, a T1 line used to be state-of-the-art, certainly now it's pretty insufficient. Not very fast. And supporting, you know, symmetrical streaming, video, video conferencing, that's sort of the state of the Internet now, which places a lot of new demands on the quality of connection. As I mentioned, the population of people who are disconnected is much higher in certain subpopulations, often those subpopulations are already disadvantaged, so lacking Internet access compounds that disadvantage. And then finally, with the rise toward ubiquity, being disconnected is more and more disabling. If you're in a very small minority of people who don't use the Internet or don't have a high-quality connection, that can be, that's more of a problem now than it was, say, 10 or 20 years ago. I have some pointers for anyone who wants to read up more about this. I would really recommend the Community Broadband Bits Podcast, which talks not so much about the technology as it does around the kind of policy and organizational issues of providing broadband in underserved areas. And then if you want to know more about the case study I talked about, there are a couple of links for that as well. And I think I'm ready now to take questions. So let me hand the ball over to you, Curtis. Okay. So first off, everyone, start posting any questions that you have in the Q&A. Carl in particular has been doing that, and we've got a couple of questions from him. I want to lead off with actually one of my own, which is that we've been talking at the highest level about Internet as this big, wide thing. And of course, the Internet is actually a collection of a ton of services, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, all of these things. Do you think that, I mean, there's a bigger impression on the sort of differentiation inside of services and usage of the Internet rather than just whether you have access or don't. That binary you commented on at the start. Yeah, I mean, yeah, so in the interest of time, I didn't have a lot of opportunity to dig into that. I glossed past some of the issues with smartphones, but certainly for certain services, smartphones are, you know, some of the apps on the smartphone are paving the way for a kind of participation and content creation. So things like Instagram and Twitter, which are very well suited to a smartphone. You can do those things. And, you know, one thing they're finding with social media is that there is real difference in the use of social media by ethnic minority groups. So in the black population, social media use is higher than it is in percentage-wise than it is in other populations. There are people I know who are studying the phenomenon of black Twitter and, you know, sort of a subcultural kind of participation in social media around Twitter that many black users are participating in. I can't really say much about what that research is finding in a lot of its early stages, but yeah, social media as a way of participating in democracy or in kind of making your voice heard on issues, smartphones may be a good solution for some aspects of that. Great. All right. So this is one of Carl's questions, which was very early in the deck. One of the reasons people weren't joining the Internet was concerns over privacy and security and all of those pieces. And he was really curious to step down into that and kind of understand more on what those concerns really are and how, I guess, relevant or how meaningful they are in the real world. Yeah. So, I mean, the Pew Internet and American Life Study doesn't break it down much further than that, that people express a concern about that. My hunch from early stages of my research is that the people who are concerned about that tend to be more educated, more tech savvy, and I wish that people were more concerned about it. I think many kind of new Internet users or, you know, people in some of the groups that are less represented online, so low-income groups or education groups, I think they're especially vulnerable, more than others, some of the security and privacy issues, and often they're not the populations that are especially concerned about it. So that's one thing I would love to just draw attention to is that, you know, another aspect of the digital divide as a concept that bothers me is that it sort of paints this rosy picture of what it means to be connected. Once you're connected, the problem's solved, but once you're connected, often that means you're newly vulnerable in ways that especially novice users are not fully aware of or savvy about. So, you know, it's generally very tech-savvy people who are using, you know, duck-duck-go or kind of protecting their identity or encrypting their emails or doing ad blockers. And the lack of knowledge about those aspects of the Internet, I think, is a concern of mine for sure. All right. So one question that popped up a couple of times, this is from Vinniak, is on these sort of moonshot-y access questions. These are things like Loone, like Facebook to Drones. How do you see those playing out in this space of rural access? Yes, I've thought about this. I'm glad that question came up. And I've actually asked some of the people who are kind of activists in this space. There's the Mendocino Broadband Alliance of Mendocino County. These are basically people who meet every month and think almost on a daily basis about how to provide Internet access in these rural areas. And I asked them about, you know, big projects like Project Loone and, you know, Elon Musk just came out with a project to use satellites to, you know, provide high-speed Internet access for the entire globe. You know, that could be a total solution. The issue I think is sort of today and in a year or in two years, there are short-term needs that may be filled in other ways. I mean, especially the Elon Musk project, it sounds like the short-term goal is five years out and the long-term goal is 15 years out. So people need Internet access today and they can't wait that long. The other issue I think many people involved in this space are really passionate about grassroots community-owned networks and have pointed to lots of problems related to incumbent operators who really have a monopoly in this space, including TNTs and the Comcast. Google having a monopoly in this space is still another monopoly. Maybe it's a more kind of, I don't know, beneficial monopoly. Maybe it's a more benevolent monopoly, but it's still, you know, far from what many people consider the ideal of having community-owned networks. Great. I think we're running out of time, so this is going to be the last question. This is from William Gibbs. In Europe, they've seen a lot of sort of public access things, Internet being a fundamental sort of service that's delivered by government agencies. Is that something that you could see happening in the U.S.? Yeah, I mean, I think the political climate is often really different here and I think what we're seeing is less kind of high-level government decisions that realize that vision is more kind of grassroots organizing. I mean, I'd love to see kind of political efforts in this country shift a little bit more over to considering the Internet to be this fundamental service. I mean, many people, some of the things we're seeing with the FCC really seem to be pushing towards considering the Internet a utility, not sort of a luxury, nice to have service, but something that needs to be available and affordable to everyone for reasons, many reasons. It's harder to sort of realize that goal in this country given our kind of political structure and political climate. Okay, great. So that's it, unfortunately. We got a hard cut at nine. But I want to thank Jenna for all of her work and presenting. And you can find more information about upcoming webinars on the Engineering for Change website. The professional development hours code is listed on the slides for those of you who are interested in that. If you have any other questions, feel free to email anybody involved. And with that, we'll thank everyone again and encourage everyone to become members of the Engineering for Change. It's really an interesting organization. And these webinars are fantastic. And hopefully you'll be around for the next one in July. Thanks, everybody. Yeah, thanks. This is Jenna. Thanks for attending the webinar. And feel free to email me my email address, which isn't on any of the slides. I just realized is jbarral at Berkeley.edu. J-B-U-R-R-E-L-L. And you can also, of course, Google my name and find all my contact information there.