By Brooklynn Cooper
08:00 on August 28, 2020 CDT
Before the coronavirus triggered closures in North Texas, Dallas city officials activated a pilot program in which library users can borrow a cellular Wi-Fi device for a month.
The investment aimed to close the virtual divide in Dallas, which is among the least connected American cities in size.
By early March, just before the closure of the coronavirus and business pandemic, 10 Dallas libraries had earned 900 hot spots to borrow.
Two weeks later, all checked.
While the pandemic has highlighted the virtual division in South Dallas, hot spots are a lifeline for those not with access to the Internet. But they don’t solve the challenge of Internet infrastructure and, in some cases, may not be enough for all virtual needs.
“There’s a gap between infrastructure and devices,” said Stephen Liu, director of large-scale strategy and infrastructure at Cisco, a generation company. “Although [Dallas is] dense and urban, not everyone has to do it [the Internet] because it’s expensive.”
The city’s proposed budget requires spending $500,000 to increase the amount of devices in libraries to approximately 2,000.
The school district also provides assistance. Less than two weeks before Dallas ISD students begin catechies online on September 8, the district has distributed more than 15,500 hot spots. Families can also pick up Chromebooks and iPads at pickup exchange locations until the end of August.
Last week, city officials launched the Digital Equity Project, a partnership with AT&T, Cisco, Presidio and CIMCON that will convert four library parking lots into hot spots. The free Wi-Fi will have the bandwidth to support video conferencing, and the city will also offer virtual workshops and children’s programming at these sites.
The libraries, Dallas West, Highland Hills, Paul Laurence Dunbar-Kiest and Prairie Creek, are a must-see.
Please note that library hot spots are not currently to be returned until August 31. That’s 8 days before DISD students start school. Borrowers cannot renew them due to high demand, however, there are no restrictions on the number of times someone can borrow one.
In mid-August, another 54 people were on the hot spots waiting list, said Jo Giudice, director of Dallas Public Libraries.
The library stopped selling the devices when the departure dates were extended, but Giudice expects the programs to be developed in September, as they did in March.
“Geographically, we knew the need was so great,” Giudice said, “and there were so many houses without the Internet that once other people found out we had them, they were just working like hot buns.”
Qiana Vance, of the University of North Texas in Dallas, borrowed a library access point in March.
The device allowed you to complete course tasks without making plans for your day when the library opened. Then, the city’s 29 libraries closed in March due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“After the spring semester, [the money] has become a little scarce, even with my spouse and my source of income together,” said Vance, who lives in South Dallas and works full-time as a fitness insurance manager.
A few weeks ago, Vance subscribed to The Internet service with Spectrum. The access point “really helped until we could access the Internet.”
In Dallas, 42% of families don’t have high-speed Internet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2016 American Community Survey.
Of the five zip codes (75216, 75215, 75212, 75217 and 75241) where maximum families do not have internet access, 4 are south of I-30.
To meet demand, 8 of the ten hot spot libraries are south of I-30.
The Dallas West branch serves 75212 in West Dallas, where almost part of families have internet access. The other branch, Bachman Lake, northwest of Dallas, is the only library serving a domain where less than 40% of families have Internet access.
In South Dallas, home to about one-third of the city’s homes, about 40% of the city’s citizens live below the poverty line, so the charge can be an impediment.
“Especially COVID,” said Jordana Barton, senior adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “They think of survival. What are they going to give up?”
Compared to other evolved countries, the United States has the highest average value of Internet services per month. South Korean prices on average are just under $30, Germany costs $35 and France $38. Here, the average is about $66.
That’s if you can get a provider to offer the Internet without including other services, said Barton, who studies the connection between the Internet and upstream mobility.
The nation’s leading Internet provider and Dallas-based corporate citizen, AT-T, offers the Internet for $10 a month to families receiving SNAP or social security benefits.
However, some citizens were unable to access the Internet, even if they simply did. Wired And DSL Internet service providers use existing infrastructure, such as telephone lines or coaxial cables, to succeed in homes.
You can’t energize an infrastructure that doesn’t exist,” Liu said. That’s why answers like 5G and fiber are more available: they don’t want to ‘dig the streets’.
Service providers are installing fiber in new neighborhoods and building 5G networks on older small cell systems—devices added to streetlights and power poles for connectivity and telephone reception.
Faster service comes with more expensive packages, which threaten to widen the gap for families who can no longer access the Internet.
“It has a lot to do with whether or not a company sees a region as a position where it can have smart businesses,” Barton said. “It’s hard to convince your shareholders to put fiber where they don’t think they’re going to get a lot of subscriptions.”
Dottie Smith and Jack Kelanic have created the Internet for everyone, a coalition of 40 Dallas-area leaders who are running to offer long-term solutions to those who don’t have access. Earlier this month, the coalition sent requests for proposals to Internet providers that may offer internal responses that charge less than existing subscription fees, ranging from $40 to $60 according to the month.
On Thursday, the coalition announced its Get Connected campaign, which allows North Texas students to report Internet disorders to their school districts and get a solution, a hot spot, in a week. Families can get help by calling the Everyone Internet hotline at 972-925-6000.
“Our estimates show that at least 75,000 families in Dallas County have reliable broadband Internet access lately,” Smith, co-chair of the coalition, said in a press release. “And that makes virtual learning difficult, if not impossible.”
The coalition is also finalizing a proposal for personal wireless networking sites, which would allow entities that already have giant Internet connections, such as school districts or libraries, to expand their signals on personal home networks. With this solution, students can connect to the DISD Internet from off-campus locations.
“It would be a game changer for academics because they wouldn’t have to do crazy things like sit in a car in a library parking lot to do their homework,” said Smith, who is also president of The Partnership, a North Texas nonprofit. committed to equity in education.
“Or use an access point among five people, slowing down speed. If you use Google Classroom, you may not be able to participate at the same speed as your peers.”
Video conferencing platforms such as Google Meet and Zoom require users to download and download videos simultaneously, requiring more bandwidth. Households with multiple children would want more than one access point to a virtual school.
“It’s not even viable,” said Barton, who represents the Federal Reserve Bank in the Internet for All coalition.
“When schools had to temporarily switch to distance education, [hot spots] were the choice.”
Jennifer Sanders, co-founder of the Dallas Innovation Alliance, is in the fight.
In June, the alliance launched the Mobile Learning Laboratory, a retired school bus that also serves as an access point. The Internet bus has a radius of three hundred feet and can accommodate a hundred simultaneous users.
These features came after CradlePoint, a wireless generation company, increased the user capacity of the cellular learning lab. The alliance had been making plans to launch the lab for more than a year, long before the coronavirus increased the need for virtual events.
“We were not planning for 20 to 40 people to be streaming at the same time, so we were really grateful for that,” Sanders said.
The Mobile Learning Laboratory is the internal gate five in Fair Park for the maximum of days of the week from nine a.m. to 3 p.m. The alliance’s online page publishes the lab calendar weekly.
The staff does not leave other people inside the bus at this time to practice social distance, however, they have an area of spaced seats and umbrellas installed around the bus so visitors can use loose Wi-Fi.
While other hot spots are planned in South Dallas, service and networking projects are being implemented to make the Internet more available to everyone.
“The long-term Internet will have to replace the economy so that the Internet works for everyone, not just the privileged,” Liu said.
Brooklynn Cooper. Brooklynn Cooper covers South Dallas as a member of the Report for America corps. The Durham, North Carolina native, a loyal Tar Heel fan graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019.