Title One Wifi

The coronavirus pandemic has hit the US extremely hard with quarantine and school closings now lasting months on end. A few of my friends and I were pretty excited when then announced schools closing I mean we could do everything from home we didn’t have to go anywhere until we realized we couldn’t see each other either but that’s not the point. We have access to everything we need to complete schoolwork online and still pass with an A. This isn’t the case for everyone though we are the lucky ones.

For kids in underserved communities and title one neighborhoods, they don’t all have access to the internet at home which can make it extremely difficult to finish and turn in online assignments on time. So we are starting a nonprofit volunteer program to bring wifi into underserved communities by partnering with various sitting we are implementing this in. Comcast has fairly low-cost internet service plans and with Covid outbreak they provide 15Mbs. We would like to bring this service plan into these communities and help them get set up. however, it would be costly to try and set up this plan at every single house in a community. So we will be using Ubiquiti network products in order to create and extremely large mesh network of wifi access points that can be used by multiple houses.

This internet would only be used for educational purposes and the network would block any sites that are educational which brings the bandwidth usage of each house down to a reasonable level for sharing it between houses.

We are using the Unifi wifi access point. You plug one of these into a cable modem and it acts as a wifi access point that also reports all traffic and data usage to the main control software. These can also be placed used to create a mesh network by attaching other access points wirelessly to the main one connected to the cable modem. It will then amplify the signal at that location and still report all information back to the software. This will allow us to monitor all network usage to look at bandwidth and if any of the access points are not working properly. We also bought a Netgear CM400 cable modem which is thirty bucks and works with Comcast. This gives us a very low-cost wifi mesh network that allows us to serve multiple houses with one internet plan.

We did some testing at my house and found a speed of 40Mbps when standing next to the access point. It had a fairly good range around 40 ft indoors with the access point being on the outside able the house. This would allow for easy noninvasive installation that still provides decent wifi coverage.

We also tested the range that you could set up a wifi mesh network which could limit how many houses we can provide internet access to. We found that the mesh network could still be created with the second access point being up to three blocks away with no loss in internet speed if there is a line of sight. This means we can theoretically supply a whole neighborhood with internet access on the same mesh network.

We cant reasonably supply a whole neighborhood with the internet that’s only 15Mbps so the other option which is what we will most likely go with is to get Comcast’s 100Mbps plan and supply the entire neighborhood with one wifi mesh network instead of doing it on a per house basis. This will make network management easier and has additional cost savings important since this is a volunteer program.

We would also like to be able to access the wifi networks through the cloud which we are still trying to figure. They have something called a cloud key which allows for this and it basically runs the control software and has an open IP address but we don’t know of this is the best option so we are still looking. We also went ahead and order a bunch of Ubiquiti’s products to see if any fit our use case better. We should start rolling this out fairly soon after some more testing and can actually get it implemented in some housing complexes in our city.