Digital Inclusion Broadband Initiative

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

A major priority for Palm Beach County in response to the COVID-19 Epidemic this year was to provide Internet access to students as identified by the school district that did not currently have or have adequate broadband access to the Internet. The challenge was creating coverage for over 50 square miles of neighborhoods under funding and time constraints, limited vertical assets, and requirements for content filtering. Enterprise IT’s response was to extend the County network to the schools. Palm Beach County IT leveraged the next generation firewall capabilities combined with the county’s IT skillset to accomplish this. 25,000 students were mapped out geographically as areas with the highest concentrations of families reporting that they had no internet access as well as a high density of district students eligible for the National School Lunch Program. A large partnership was formed between public and private entities to create the County Digital Inclusion Broadband Initiative project.