Community Broadband Wireless Issues:
Building Community Consensus

Communities are typically heterogeneous and diverse. Most have previous experience on a variety of community projects. The range of interests and forces that will ultimately influence the overall direction of a community wireless project is varied and sometimes conflicting. Successful projects discover these forces early and try to consider them throughout the project’s development – collecting requirements, organizational structure, governance, implementation, and operations. Ultimately, any differences need to be positively resolved within the shared vision, goals, and objectives for the project.

To effectively express their wireless broadband needs, communities often require a lot of information about the project’s full potential, and in those cases, public education is often required.

In general, RPM has seen the overall community needs expressed in three broad but related categories:

• The need to drive more cost-effective public services and safety,
• The need for greater digital inclusion, or making low-cost broadband connectivity available to low income and/or rural areas, and
• The need for economic development to raise the standard of living for the entire community.

Projects typically start with a core stakeholder team that comes together with a common concept for the project. This group’s pre-disposition usually reflects community need, but needs to be verified by data that is collected from a cross-section of the entire community. This is especially important for complex communities, such as a large city, or very diverse regional geographies with multiple overlapping jurisdiction, entities, and interests. If data collection is not fully representative, the project leaves itself open to criticism in later development stages.