How to Bring High-Speed Internet Access to Public Housing (Episode 73)

You look at it from the point of view of the customer. You’re living in an apartment building, perhaps. You have a wire that runs from the wall that goes to your router, well from the wall, it may go to the roof and there’s wireless transmitters on the roof. And that’ll bounce around maybe one or two places in San Francisco and then hop on a fiber optic cable to an exchange in San Francisco, and then it will go to the rest of the Internet, wherever it’s headed off to most likely.

And so that’s different from many of us have a wired ISP, a cable company, or a fiber optic company. And our access is not … It doesn’t touch a wire wireless network at all. In this case, they use both wires and wireless. And so they have fiber optics, they’ve got wireless, they sort of do whatever it takes to get their signal around. And they do it very well.

Welcome to the show, Hannah.

One of them that I think is really important is in 2018, I feel crazy saying this, we still have people building buildings. I mean we’re not even just low income housing but all kinds of buildings without proper wiring. That blows my mind. You don’t spend as much time fretting about things like this but was that surprising to you?

But yeah, so they were undergoing major remodels and that included rewiring of all the units. And so during that process, before Monkey Brains and other ISPs or the Department of Technology of the city of San Francisco got involved. They were wiring for category 5e, which is a type of Ethernet wire that supports …

I mean we’re talking about, I think definitely a gig, possibly 10 gigs under the right circumstances over short distances of like well under a hundred meters. That’s the issue that we’re talking about is that they have one of these cables to each unit. And they were planning on using it just for the phone. And then Monkey Brains came in and said, “Hey, if you use the right attachment, termination point in the wall, we can have a jack that will allow you to use both a phone cord and 100 megabits of internet access.” If they used it entirely for internet access, they could do a gig or they could use it only for phone. But because Monkey Brains intervened when they did, they were able to make sure every unit could get a hundred megabits and have phone service as well.

If you wanted to go crazy you could have conduit and then you could make it more complicated. But at a minimum you want to make sure that each unit has, I would say, at least two of these cables running to it. One for phone, one for high capacity internet access. And fundamentally you may want to have multiple cords if you want to do … Leave yourself room for expansion in the future. But I think too many places just think, “Well Comcast will run their cords or AT&T will run their cords, and that’s the problem solved.” And that’s actually problem created.

So if we step back for a second, I mean these were areas of the city that have been significantly rehabilitated under a specific program that you wanted to tell us a little bit about. And I think it’s relevant for making sure that other cities that are looking at these opportunities get it right the first time.

But section eight housing basically is … Well, section eight is actually a voucher where individuals who are low income that need rental assistance can apply and get that funding to basically reduce their costs to just, I think it’s about 30% of their income. In San Francisco, there’s a minimum amount that they have to pay for rent, which is, I believe, $25.

That’s what your case study is really going to talk about, is that when these properties are being redeveloped, you can get the wiring internally right. You can make it easy for an ISP, a for-profit ISP, or a nonprofit ISP, to come in, offer good services that will work for them. Now in this case, Monkeybrains also had the benefit of a program from the California Public Utilities Commission, what we often called CPC. Specifically a program within there called the California Event Services Fund, which people and often referred to as CASF.

It’s kind of like putting pieces of the puzzle together for financing. Also, you have to have a city that’s looking to renovate and update its public housing, which as we’ve seen everywhere, is kind of the case where it needs a lot of updating in a lot of major cities. It’s not like it wouldn’t be able to be possible. Yeah, just finding those pieces of financing to get it going.

Hey Lisa, can we jump in again?

When Monkeybrains was first connecting Hunter’s Point East and West, I believe both of them, perhaps it was just half of it, but the point is that they wanted to bring it online very quickly. They threw some wireless on the roof, and they were able to just connect it to the rest of the Monkeybrains network. Over a over the next year, I think, San Francisco brought its municipal fiber network to connect Hunter’s Point. Now, Hunter’s Point is connected entirely by fiber, but the wireless allowed them to move quickly, and it’s still offered a super high capacity network.

I’ve looked at some of the network logs, and you can see the traffic, and their wireless network can handle it just fine. Now again, to make sure people are understanding this, you may have in an apartment building you may have a wireless router, and people have their devices, a laptop, a tablet, whatever, on that. From there, it goes to the router, and it probably runs on the copper wire, which is Cat5e, to the building, a basement, a telco closet might be near the roof. There, it’ll either jump on fiber to go across San Francisco’s municipal network to the main data center in San Francisco, or it may travel wirelessly for some part of the way, and then get on a fiber network to go to that data center.

The way the data moves in this case is actually kind of irrelevant to the user, because they get a high capacity approach. It gives Monkeybrains flexibility to be able to build a network quickly, and have it be resilient.

Some people that are far away from the access point, it’s not going to be as good. On the other hand, you also have like, maybe you have some teenagers that are like screwing around, and they’re thinking, yeah if we do this thing technologically, we could sort of spy on some of the neighbors. Right. That is the sort of thing that when each home is individually connected, you have more privacy and protection. Now, if you’re a sophisticated person on a shared Wifi, you could still be very protected. I think there’s just less room for error, and there’s a much higher quality when each person, each household has their own connection. Rather than having to share a connection with others on their floor.

These are mostly one time investments, so they can provide service on an ongoing basis at a very low cost. If you get the one time investments right. Whereas, I think too many public housing facilities settle for having Wifi in the hallways, which doesn’t deliver a good service to everyone. It’s certainly not an even service. I think there’s security concerns about it. Although, there are practices that could remedy a number of those. The challenge fundamentally is that I believe we should be striving to have Internet access to everyone in their home that is not interfered with by their neighbors. That’s something that I believe Monkeybrains is really getting right.

Let’s just briefly talk about this a little bit. The services, depending on the wiring of the home, they’re getting 100 megabits or a gigabit. Right?

Hannah Rank:

Hannah Rank:

Hannah Rank:

Hannah Rank:

Hannah Rank:

Another, a piece of that that actually is, we discussed in the report quite a bit that’s important, is that Monkey Brains takes questions and problems, technical support questions from residents of these buildings in the same way that they do their other customers. A piece of it that we were very clear on in the report is that the Community Tech Network, a local nonprofit group, and actually some other nonprofits as well, have all helped to help educate people, get devices in their hands, make sure that they have the literacy to know how to use these devices well, and also help answer their technical support questions that may not be related to the network, so that Monkey Brains is not constantly fielding calls from someone who says, my browser is not working because of a user error that they’re having. One of the challenges-

If you have a device that you know how to use and you like using it, that’s half the battle. But also just feeling safe and comfortable on the internet, knowing that it can be a great tool to connect with your friends and family and also a tool to participate in the economy. Whether it’s even just going on a job board and finding a job to starting a small business. There’s lots of shades to that. But all of those make you feel like a participant in one of the most powerful forms of connection, the internet.

When you think about how expensive it can be to have a wireless internet plan, I’m sorry, an internet plan rather. And to have a smartphone service, the pairing of those two can be prohibitive for people. So they just choose, you know, I need to call people, I need text people, I’ll just use my internet on my phone and try to work with that. But if anyone’s tried to edit a paper or look something more in depth up online, it’s just, on a smart phone, very hard to do. So it’s much better to have a device where you can have all the options for using the internet.

But those one time costs you might think of as, one, wiring the individual unit, and that should be, I mean, well under $100 per unit to do, particularly when the walls are up and everything else. I mean, well under $100 to get all that wiring to each unit to Cat 5 wires or a fiber too. At that point when the walls are open, it’s really cheap to put a lot of things in it. Running conduit would be nice. In some cases it may be impractical. And then typically just for people to see conceptually you want to run each unit to a closet on that floor maybe, or down to a basement, a room. You just want to make it very easy for someone to come in and just by going to one or two rooms in your building, be able to connect home any unit anywhere basically.

That’s one of the onetime costs. And then the other which is more significant would be getting high quality internet access to the building, either through a fiber network that could be very costly if the city does not already have one nearby. Or you can use a what Monkey Brains uses in many cases in its business, which is a high capacity fixed wireless link, where you might be looking at on the order of $3,000 per radio I think to do that. I’m not as good yet at remembering if it’s per pair or per radio. But those are one time costs that that, again, if you can just take care of them and not have any debt associated with them, then your operating costs are very low to be able to deliver high quality Internet access, whether from a nonprofit or from a for profit company to those units.

Again, then your largest cost is going to be your help desk is what we call it, but if you have a digital inclusion program, which is something that you probably really need anyway for other benefits, and they can really help take some of the pressure off of the ISP, then at a relatively low charge you could have a very good ISP taking care of a lot of that rather than doing it yourself. Certainly no problem doing it yourself in many cases. But in my experience people would rather have a specialized company doing that anyway.

Monkey Brains is showing that this can all work, and you’re explaining to the world how, how that works.

There’s a lot of credit to the city of San Francisco for making this happen. There’s a lot of credit for Monkey Brains, and for people working in the nonprofit for community tech network and stuff like that.