4/5/2019 Connecting Rural Appalachia with Community-Owned Broadband
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Connecting Rural Appalachia with
Community-Owned Broadband
The Southern Connected Communities Network
(SCCN) couples access with agency in Tennessee
This is a spotlight on the Southern Connected Communities Network
(SCCN), a grand prize winner in our NSF-WINS challenges. Learn more
about the NSF-WINS competition here.
Mozilla Follow
Sep 25, 2018 · 3 min read
. . .
When you think of high-speed internet, you might picture underground
cables owned and operated by corporate ISPs.
But in New Market, TN, high-speed internet looks like quite the
opposite: an 80-foot tower owned and operated by the very community
members who rely on its connectivity.
This is the approach of the Southern Connected Communities Network
(SCCN), a novel approach to connecting the unconnected in the U.S.,
The Southern Connected Communities Network tower
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where some 34 million Americans lack high-quality internet access.
SCCN is a project by the Highlander Research and Education Center —
and it just won a $400,000 grand prize in Mozilla and the National
Science Foundation’s NSF-WINS Challenges.
“When you live in the rural South, your kids’ education, your next job,
your healthcare, and your right to a political voice all are limited by
slow, expensive, unreliable, and corporate-controlled internet
connectivity — and that’s if it exists at all,” says Allyn Maxeld-Steele,
Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Center. “So we’re claiming
internet like the human right it has become. We’re building a local
digital economy governed by us and for us.”
How does SCCN work? On a technical level, SCCN uses an 80-foot
tower to draw wireless backbone from Knoxville, TN via the public 11
GHz spectrum. The tower then redistributes this broadband
connectivity to local communities using line-of-sight technology.
But there’s a community aspect, too — the tower is owned and operated
by local residents. “It’s not just about the technological stu,” Maxeld-
Steele says. “It’s about how do we build it and how do we control it and
demystify it.” This happens through grassroots organizing and
education, Maxeld-Steele explains.
The Southern Connected Communities Network tower
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He adds: “This project seeks to ground internet access in a human
rights framework: where people not only have access to one of the 21st
century’s most important economic determinants, but where people
can self-determine, collectively, how that access plays out.”
The results have been hugely encouraging: “With this project, we’re
able to connect people from rural Appalachia and the deep south with
folks across the globe,” Maxeld-Steele says.
In the months ahead, the Highlander team will use the prize money to
“organize and build out the initial prototype,” Maxeld-Steele notes.
From there, they’ll scale — bringing their community access approach
to others who, up until now, have been underconnected. “Hopefully
over the next couple years we’ll expand into two or three dierent
communities,” Maxeld-Steele says.
The Southern Connected Communities Network team
4/5/2019 Connecting Rural Appalachia with Community-Owned Broadband
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