Community partners to broadcast free Wi-Fi for schoolchildren from top of Cathedral of Learning – By Teghan Simonton (Trib Live) / Nov 17 2020
Students in three communities in the Pittsburgh region will soon have access to free, at-home internet.
Four community partners — Meta Mesh Wireless Communities, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and the Keystone Initiative for Network-based Research (KINBER) — have formed Every1online, a program to provide high-speed internet for school-aged children in the area. The source of the signal: the top of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning.
“It seems extremely appropriate to me that the hub that’s making this sort of crazy sci-fi idea work is literally called the Cathedral of Learning,” said Ashley Williams Patton, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Pathways Programs.
The goal is to bridge the digital divide — an issue that’s existed long before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated by the advent of widespread remote schooling. Four antennas will be mounted to the top of the Cathedral. Bandwidth provided by KINBER will be relayed out to local towers in Every1online’s three pilot communities: New Kensington, Coraopolis and the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood.
