Supporting Digital Equity in Seattle’s diverse neighborhoods

Seattle has long valued and supported community-driven technology solutions, recognizing that local neighborhoods and micro communities know best what's needed to support digital equity within our large diverse city. Seattle established our Technology Matching Fund program in 1996 to support the community's efforts to close the digital divide and encourage a technology-healthy city. For the past 26 years we've had the grant program as a cornerstone of the City's Digital Equity Program. The Seattle Community Network project is an example of such a community-driven solution, using Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum and WiFi to help meet local digital equity needs and offer free internet access to low-income and housing insecure residents.

Seattle IT's collaboration on the Seattle Community Network (SCN) project started in 2020, with a grant to the Local Connectivity Lab (LCL) for two pilot SCN sites. The LCL, which started the SCN project in 2019, is a local non-profit originating from the UW and focused on deploying open-source cellular network technologies to help people run their own community networks. Seattle IT's funding goal was to have a proof of concept for the capacity and reliability of how the shared CBRS spectrum could work in our city to offer a free internet access option in areas with lower-income populations. Along with grants for network equipment, Seattle IT's Digital Equity Program worked to bring in other collaborators, like the Seattle Public Schools and the Seattle Housing Authority to help the LCL explore access to building rooftops to place SCN antennas. It also leveraged Seattle's Access for All program to have Lumen provide free fiber connections to serve as the internet backhaul for some of the SCN node sites.

This year (2024) the Technology Matching Fund program granted SCN additional funds to continue expansion of their project, with a particular focus on connectivity in Low Income Housing Institute(LIHI) Tiny Home Villages, serving residents that have the added connectivity barriers of housing insecurity.

The SCN now has ten active connectivity sites demonstrating a variety of internet backhaul solutions. Two sites offer community WiFi over SCN (CBRS-based) 4G LTE service, four provide LIHI Tiny Home Villages with village-wide WiFi with ISP (Lumen) Fiber, and three provide Tiny Home Village WiFi with T-mobile 5G Fixed Wireless.

Seattle IT is happy to be part of the broad collaboration the LCL has cultivated to support the SCN and its community-driven model; a model that goes beyond just providing free internet access. Under the leadership of its Director Esther Jang, LCL has worked with many community-based organizations and other entities to foster community empowerment, participatory construction, digital skill building, and have the SCN act as a vehicle for residents and institutions to help each other toward a sustainable community internet access model. 

The SCN project is always looking formore passionate technical volunteers (or those willing to learn) who are dedicated to helping people empower themselves through technology and have the time and capacity to work up to leadership roles in network installations/maintenance, funding/grant-writing, or community organizing.  More information on the SCN project, including how to volunteer and an interactive map showing network locations and performance, is available at seattlecommunitynetwork.org.