Q&A with the Winners: Esther Jang

In this Q&A, Esther Jang talks about her team’s solution — Scaling the Seattle Community Network with dAuth and the “Teaching Network”— which won the BEST OVERALL Proof of Concept prize, sponsored by VMware in the 2022 Connecting the Unconnected Challenge.

1.Please summarize your winning solution

Our team is leveraging new advances in private cellular networks (“Private LTE”) and shared spectrum (“CBRS”, the Citizens Broadband Radio Service) to develop and deploy new cellular access models that are capable of scaling beyond individual community partners and connect the unconnected. Our solution, deployed as the Seattle Community Network, consists of two core innovations: First, we are developing a novel core network solution that allows federating different local (“private”) cellular community networks together into one large regional mobile network capable of covering multiple areas using commodity 4G/5G hardware in CBRS spectrum. Second, we have paired this system with community outreach and trainings with partner community organizations ranging from the Black Brilliance Research Project, Seattle Public Schools and Libraries, Tacoma Public Libraries, and others in the Puget Sound region as well as a number of Tribal organizations around the American West (the Tribal Digital Village and Tribal Broadband Bootcamp). Complementing our technical work, these trainings are essential to build local capacity and resilience to realize our vision of networks built and maintained by the community of users they connect. 

2.What is the most unique/innovative aspect about your approach?

Instead of scaling centrally (i.e., increasing the individual capacity of partners to become regional ISPs), our solution is designed to scale laterally by adding new NGOs to the federation. This is because these NGOs were founded to first provide support to local communities and their interest in Internet access is only in support of their own organizational goals. We do not expect partners such as the Seattle Public Schools to suddenly become a regional ISP. This design also has the side benefit of creating diverse supporting educational content, targeted at multiple populations, that can be shared across the federation.

3.What did you enjoy most about the CTU Competition and Summit Program?

It was really wonderful to engage with the other participants in the competition and understand their unique problems and solutions. It also allowed us an opportunity to solidify our vision for the interaction between the social and technical elements of our proposal. 

4.What are your projects plans for the next 12-18 months?

In the next year and a half, we are broadly hoping to scale our programs and make them more replicable, to reach more people with robust Internet access and trainings. We are working on formalizing the hands-on lab components of our community networking curriculum, including training on wireless access networks such as WiFi and LTE, as well as our core networking stack and protocols (BGP, OSPF, etc.). We hope that opening up this knowledge will help empower other fledgling community networks, rural ISPs, and individuals to understand and implement more locally owned and operated Internet access throughout the world. Meanwhile, on the local level we also hope to expand our wireless coverage, especially using unlicensed wireless gear, to allow more people to connect to our access networks. Lastly we are working to “productize” and deploy our distributed core network at scale throughout SCN.

5.What is your estimate of the number of people impacted by your program? 

We estimate over 100 project beneficiaries so far. There have been ~60 device recipients, ~20 adults trained or employed in community networking-related roles through our various partnerships and programs, ~30 youth trained or engaged in volunteer work through our youth program cohorts, and other non-device recipients using our LTE and WiFi access networks who are also living in the Tiny Home Villages, low-income housing, and other sites where we have set up Internet access.