The San Jerardo Cooperative, seen from above. Before it was bought by farmworker families in the late 1970s, it was used as housing for Bracero Program workers. Before that, it was a U.S. Department of Agriculture camp known as Camp McCallum.
A Cruzio crew installs a rooftop radio at San Jerardo, ensuring that it is level and within eyeshot of another, larger radio that distributes signal around this part of the neighborhood.
Congressman Jimmy Panetta, D-Carmel Valley, speaks in Closter Park in Salinas in January 2022 about federal investments in broadband.
Right: Inside the homes, a small black power box for the rooftop radio antenna and a slightly larger black Wi-Fi router were the only indication that the crews had been here.
The San Jerardo Cooperative, seen from above. Before it was bought by farmworker families in the late 1970s, it was used as housing for Bracero Program workers. Before that, it was a U.S. Department of Agriculture camp known as Camp McCallum.
THE SAN JERARDO FARMWORKER HOUSING COOPERATIVE is located to the southeast of Salinas, a small neighborhood smack in the middle of the wide agricultural fields that line Old Stage Road. Though it is only about 10 miles from downtown it feels like another world – dry winds off the Gabilan mountains kick up dust and it’s quiet, save for the barking of dogs and the faint sounds of a mariachi song.
When the San Jerardo co-op was created in the late 1970s it represented a great success of political organizing – a safe place to call home for the farmworkers helping to feed America. Today, this housing development is at the forefront of another social equity effort, one that is focused on bringing quality, affordable high-speed internet into every household in Monterey County.
On a sunny August morning, technicians from the Santa Cruz-based internet service provider Cruzio Internet are wearing fluorescent vests and roaming the co-op’s streets and neatly fenced gardens, climbing up to the roofs of the single-story homes and then running wires inside, linking the occupants to a vast information network. There are a lot of ladders involved, and a lot of zip-ties.
Work moves quickly – within about an hour one duplex building is ready to go. Except for a small white box on the rooftop and a new black router tucked in a corner of the living room, there’s almost no indication anyone was here. The technicians move on to the next roof, like elves leaving technological advancement in their wake. Soon, the co-op’s roughly 250 year-round residents will have a new high-speed internet connection – for free.
The San Jerardo project, a collaboration between Cruzio and the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership known as Equal Access Monterey Bay, is just one current local effort to bridge the digital divide and bring broadband access to all. With an official ribbon cutting scheduled for Sept. 7, it is the first to reach completion.
THE “DIGITAL DIVIDE” IS THE IDEA OF DIGITAL HAVES AND HAVE-NOTS, often separated along existing socioeconomic or racial lines. While the term can describe a complete lack of internet availability, the digital divide in Monterey County – and the United States more generally – is more often about the lack of reliable, affordable internet than it is about lack of internet entirely. County residents with no in-home internet connection whatsoever make up a portion of the problem, but it is far more common that people have a connection option that does not meet their needs or is prohibitively expensive.
Overall, according to the American Community Survey, 87.7 percent of Monterey County households have a broadband internet subscription – meaning that about 12 percent do not. That number of have-nots is higher in certain areas, however – in Salinas 17.1 percent of households have no in-home internet access (according to research by the fiber network company Underline) and at San Jerardo, it is estimated that only around 13 of 66 houses had internet before the Cruzio project began.
For those that do have an internet connection, that subscription may be unaffordable or too slow to meet their needs.
“It does no good to have internet access if you’re dropping your connection and you have to pay $70 a month [but don’t have the discretionary income to support that],” says Freny Cooper, chief operating officer of the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership, a nonprofit supporting economic development in Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey counties.
For years, advocates have spoken about the impact of this divide, how the lack of (sufficient) internet access means less access to schooling, job opportunities, medical care and other elements of civic life. Then the Covid-19 pandemic threw the issue into greater relief. Almost overnight the analog world filled with danger and we retreated to the digital – if we could. Instances where access fell short became very obvious.
In August 2020, for example, a photo of two Salinas students sitting outside a Taco Bell to use the fast food restaurant’s Wi-Fi went viral, eliciting a quick, emotional response. Stories appeared across a range of national outlets, including USA Today, CNN and People. It was the first school year of the pandemic, and the Salinas City Elementary School District provided its students, including the girls in the photo, with hotspots (a common quick fix for connectivity issues) and Chromebooks to enable distance learning.
By December 2020 the photo was being cited by local lawmakers as a key inspiration for a rush of broadband for all legislation. “The stars are aligning,” Monterey County District 1 Supervisor Luis Alejo told The Californian. “We knew that this was a problem for so long, but this pandemic and this image of these two little girls have really pushed state policymakers to really make some movement and action happen this coming year.”
San Jerardo provides a good example of what the digital divide looks like. Even before Cruzio began extending its service to the co-op, San Jerardo was not a complete deadzone. Martha Rubio, a 35-year resident of San Jerardo and mother of three, lives in one of the households that did have an internet connection. It came at a high cost, though – Rubio says the only option she was able to find was satellite internet that cost her about $190 per month. It was a big expenditure for the family, but “I had no other choice,” Rubio says. “My kids had to connect.”
So how do we bridge this digital divide and extend truly accessible internet to all? Different communities around Monterey County are working to answer that question in different ways. “There’s no magic bullet,” MBEP’s Cooper says. “There are multiple layers to all this.”
A Cruzio crew installs a rooftop radio at San Jerardo, ensuring that it is level and within eyeshot of another, larger radio that distributes signal around this part of the neighborhood.
BROADBAND IS NOT EXACTLY A SEXY ISSUE – a fact that speaks to the place internet access occupies in our lives. It is at once crucial for modern life and also, at its core, a kind of hidden utility. Think of it, perhaps, like plumbing: Few people spare much thought for what happens when they flush a toilet, but having a toilet that reliably flushes is critically important to their quality of life.
Another part of the challenge is that broadband is a technical topic – conversation about internet access quickly spirals into an acronym-filled discussion of how many megabits per second a given connection allows, not a metric most laypeople are familiar with. A basic understanding of the numbers does help define the issue, though.
In the simplest terms, “broadband” means high-speed internet access. But how fast is fast depends on who you ask. The Federal Communications Commission defines broadband as speeds of at least 25 megabits per second (mbps) download and 3 megabits per second upload. This definition isn’t without its detractors – many argue that this is too slow to be truly “high speed” and that a definition like this will allow the government to meet its stated “broadband for all” goal without delivering service that people actually experience as being fast.
At the state level, the California Public Utilities Commission defines an “unserved” area as a location that does not have at least 25/3 mbps service. That said, the state is striving for more moving forward – in order to be eligible for state funding, broadband projects must deliver speeds of at least 100 mbps download and 20 mbps upload.
This is in keeping with how broadband is defined regionally and within Monterey County. Speeds of 100/20 mbps are “kind of the minimum for what you need for today’s data needs,” Cooper says. At San Jerardo, Cruzio is promising 100 mbps download and 100 mbps upload.
Broadband is not in itself a technology – it’s more of a promise of customer experience – but it does require technological infrastructure. That infrastructure might include millimeter wave radio frequency, satellites in low earth orbit (like Elon Musk’s Starlink) or fiber – a network cable containing strands of glass fiber that is widely considered to be the future of digital communication. What kind of technology works best in a given situation depends on factors like geography and population density – burying miles and miles of fiber in mountainous Big Sur, for example, is cost-prohibitive, so satellite internet offers a good alternative. At the San Jerardo co-op, which is too remote for fiber but located on flat land, Cruzio chose to build out its network using millimeter wave technology.
THE SAN JERARDO PROJECT BEGAN IN NOVEMBER 2020 when former California Public Utilities Commissioner Martha Guzman Aceves approached the Central Coast Broadband Consortium with a problem. She had been in touch with San Jerardo’s then-general manager, Horacio Amezquita, and heard about the groups of students who filled his office daily looking for an internet connection to complete their schoolwork. Could the Central Coast Broadband Consortium, an ad hoc group of local government agencies, economic development groups and private businesses, do something to help?
“The CPUC really wanted to see this happen,” says James Hackett, director of business operations and development at Cruzio, a small Santa Cruz-based internet service provider that is part of the Consortium. “It looked like just the type of project that the broadband expansion funds should be funding.”
For Cruzio, this kind of project is increasingly part of the repertoire – in 2020 the company teamed up with the Community Foundation Santa Cruz County and the Santa Cruz County Office of Education to bring free internet access to the 140 residences at the Buena Vista Migrant Center in Watsonville.
Free internet for the end user still requires funding for construction and maintenance, so, first, the Equal Access Monterey Bay project leaders set about fundraising for both the costs of construction and the costs of service.
On the former, at a meeting on Sept. 9, 2021, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a grant of $292,548 to support the San Jerardo project. “Not every Californian is fortunate to have a provider like this,” Commissioner Guzman Aceves said after the approval, praising Cruzio. “They really have a mindset of building for the future.”
“We’re delighted that the CPUC, in their wisdom, granted us the funds,” Hackett said at the time. “Now we do it.”
“Doing it” meant first tapping into the fiber line that connects Santa Cruz to Soledad, then beaming the internet to the co-op in the form of millimeter wave radio frequency. Then, from a small dish atop a water tank at the entrance to the development (a “distribution node,” in telecoms speak), the internet is beamed around to radio antennas (modest-sized white boxes called “client nodes”) throughout the neighborhood – one on each building.
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This is the work the fluorescent-vested technicians undertook most recently, climbing onto the roofs of San Jerardo to mount each antenna. From there, another team of technicians runs wires along the side of the building, stapling it out of sight under the eaves, and eventually into the building’s units.
Inside a neat living room appointed with ample couches and a massive TV, technician Sonya Campbell installs the necessary “customer premises equipment”: a power source for the radio antenna (a small black box) and a router for the customer’s Wi-Fi service (a slightly larger black box). Meanwhile, one house over, an English-speaking technician phones a translator to help explain what he’s doing to the home’s Spanish-speaking residents. How fast will the internet be? They ask. Oh, much faster than what you’re using now, the technician assures them.
Service will also be free for the first five years. That’s a goal that the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership is fundraising to support – the group created a fund through the Community Foundation for Monterey County and hopes to raise $200,000 in donations to cover Cruzio’s operations costs.
Once the five-year period ends, Hackett says users will pay $15/month.
Congressman Jimmy Panetta, D-Carmel Valley, speaks in Closter Park in Salinas in January 2022 about federal investments in broadband.
THE SAN JERARDO PROJECT IS JUST ONE LOCAL BROADBAND EFFORT – its contours and funding streams and technologies used are just one example of what’s possible. There are others, just as there is strong policy interest in increasing access at every level of government.
On a blustery, blue-skied afternoon in early January, about 15 political leaders – among them Congressman Jimmy Panetta, County Supervisor Luis Alejo and Salinas Mayor Kimbley Craig – convened for a broadband press conference at Closter Park in Salinas. The rest of the park’s denizens, including kids racing each other around the Rotary Club gazebo and teens playing basketball, paid the gathering little mind, though the topic discussed could have major impacts on their lives and the future of the neighborhood.
As attention on the digital divide has increased, so too has the pipeline of money flowing to fix it. “There was an era where you had to convince policymakers that broadband was an important political issue that [needed to be] addressed, and I don’t think you need to address that anymore,” Professor Christopher Yoo told Penn Today in June 2021.
In July 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to invest $6 billion in broadband infrastructure and access. A key component of this investment involves building, operating and maintaining a state-owned fiber network for what’s known as the “middle mile” – fiber infrastructure that connects to the existing fiber backbone (which is often compared to an interstate highway) and brings connectivity closer to regional users (kind of like a state highway). In May 2022, the state announced it has contracts in place to purchase enough fiberoptic cable to build 3,000 miles of the middle-mile network.
There’s also funding available from the federal government. The November 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $65 billion for broadband nationally – the news Panetta was in Closter Park to share.
“This is an absolutely historic investment,” he said, calling the bill “an example of how the federal government can work for us.”
One organization hoping to take advantage of those funds is the newly formed Salinas Valley Broadband Authority, a joint powers authority with membership from the cities of Soledad, Gonzales, King City and Greenfield and the county of Monterey. The goal of the JPA, as County Supervisor Chris Lopez sees it, is to work together to make sure some amount of this big pot is sent in their direction.
“There’s a lot of new funding available… at the end, you rely on rulemaking and processes in terms of how communities can or can’t access that funding,” Lopez says. “We’re trying to pull down as much funding as we can through this JPA to offset the cost of our vision – which is to run fiber to every home.”
Lopez’s District 3 encompasses all of South Monterey County, and he also wants to advocate for the region to see some of California’s middle-mile fiber investment. The middle-mile network currently ends in Soledad – Lopez would like to see it continue south into San Luis Obispo county, to Paso Robles.
For Lopez, building this internet infrastructure throughout South County is about much more than the impact lack of access has on people today – it’s about setting his community up to attract the businesses and workers necessary to thrive into the future.
“Not having access to the internet will become more than just ‘Oh, kids couldn’t get to school,’” he says. “It’s going to be the difference between health outcomes, it’s going to be the difference in terms of economic opportunity, and it’s going to create a vast difference in terms of how a community grows.”
THE CITY OF SALINAS IS TAKING ITS OWN APPROACH. While there are more providers offering service within the city than at more remote locations like San Jerardo, plans still often cost too much for low-income residents and speed-tests show that the reality on the ground is significantly slower than what internet service providers advertise.
The city has partnered with a company called Underline to build a city-wide open-access fiber network. The company, which began in 2019, raises private investment (an estimated $85 million, in the case of Salinas) to build fiber infrastructure in cities that do not have it. It then leases the use of the network to a number of local internet service providers (this is the “open” component of open-access) who compete for users. Prices for access are set by Underline (starting at $49 for 500 mbps download/500 mbps upload); a portion of the user’s monthly bill goes to pay Underline, and the rest goes to the ISP.
Open-access fiber networks of this model are not yet common in the United States, though Utah’s 11-city fiber network partnership known as UTOPIA Fiber provides one example. Underline is also currently building networks in Colorado Springs and Fountain, Colorado. The Salinas project is in its network design phase – Eva Arevuo, Underline’s head of communications and marketing, says the company expects to be able to begin construction in early 2023.
Underline CEO Bob Thompson spoke to Salinas City Council at a Dec. 14, 2021 meeting, pitching the big promise of his company’s service. “We’ve reached a point in this society where it’s absolutely table stakes that people in American communities have access to the internet that’s fast, affordable and fair,” he said. Council voted 7-0 to approve the license agreement. Since then the city has entered into two more agreements with Underline.
While Underline does not tend to go after public funding available for broadband infrastructure, Arevuo says the company has definitely benefited from the fervor of the national conversation around the digital divide. “We were knocking on an open door,” she says.
Right: Inside the homes, a small black power box for the rooftop radio antenna and a slightly larger black Wi-Fi router were the only indication that the crews had been here.
FOR MARTHA RUBIO AND HER FAMILY AT SAN JERARDO, the free Cruzio service is a game-changer – so far it seems fast enough and it takes financial strain off the family. Her kids – ages 13, 11 and 8 – are back in school in-person now, but they still have homework assignments to complete online and maybe, someday, they’ll use the connection to apply for college or a job or some other opportunity. “We are really thankful,” Rubio says.
But perhaps best of all: The family’s connection to this modern utility is now simply available, like a properly flushing toilet, no longer something Rubio has to worry about.
“It’s just good,” she says.
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Issue August 25, 2022 - Efforts are underway to get Monterey County’s rural areas connected to high-speed internet.
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