Non-profit effort launches wireless broadband in low-income Houston area

Houston, TX, Feb. 17, 2005 -- (MobileVillage) -- Houston Mayor Bill White and leaders from Rice University, the Houston Public Library and nonprofit Technology For All (TFA) today announced the rollout of TFA-Wireless, a social enterprise project of TFA that will provide free or discounted high-speed wireless Internet access to individuals, businesses and community organizations in Houston's Pecan Park neighborhood in the East End.

Residents of the neighborhood who have a Houston Public Library Power Card and who attend an orientation class at the library or at TFA's community technology center at Mission Milby Community Development Corporation, 2220 Broadway, will be eligible to receive free or reduced-rate Internet services from TFA-Wireless.

TFA will also provide the Melcher Branch of the Houston Public Library with wireless high-speed Internet access for the use of its customers. The project will also harness the citywide SimHouston program to provide free e-mail, desktop software and online services for TFA-Wireless users.

The TFA-Wireless network is based on a combination of off-the-shelf hardware and customized networking software developed during the past 18 months by faculty and students in Rice's electrical and computer engineering department.

"The City of Houston is pleased to join Technology For All in their efforts to provide Internet access to one of Houston's underserved communities," Mayor White said. "The program will provide additional services to library customers and encourage community members to increase usage of the services available at their neighborhood library."

TFA-Wireless serves a 1.6-square-mile area of the Pecan Park Super Neighborhood in Houston's East End bounded by I-45 South, the 610 South Loop, Highway 225, Lawndale Street and Griggs Road. The price of commercially available high-speed Internet service is beyond the means of most residents in the low-income neighborhood.

TFA, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, says it is dedicated to "empowering under-resourced communities through social enterprises using the tools of technology." TFA provides various services, including workforce training, recycling and redeployment of corporate technology assets, document-conversion services for the business community, online content for workforce training, and consulting and leadership in over 300 community organizations operating community technology centers in Houston and 56 other U.S. cities.

In most locales where wireless Internet access is available today, such as a coffee shop or an airport lounge, each wireless hub requires its own wired connection to the Internet. The cost of providing this wired "backhaul" for each wireless access point is usually several thousand dollars per month.

Using a new technology developed at Rice called "TAPs," or Transit Access Points, Knightly and Ph.D. student Joseph Camp were able to deploy a pilot network of 12 wireless transmitters that pass information among one another. Camp spent the past year deploying this "multi-hop" network, which is far cheaper to operate than conventional networks because it requires only one wireline connection to the Internet, according to TFA.

In building the network, Camp and Knightly quickly determined that the perfect site for the central network hub was the Melcher Branch Library, which sits squarely in the middle of the network footprint.

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