TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) — The square mug café is a place where people come to eat, sometimes they might have some coffee, and many times people utilize the Wi-Fi the café provides. Donna Elliott says even though her internet works most of the time, it's not available to customers when they're not open.
Florida A&M University announced it received a $5.4 million grant from the National Telecommunications Information Administration to expand internet access to students and the southside community. Elliott, who is also a southside resident, thinks the project is much needed.
"The southside is often forgotten about and there's a lot of need in this community, in this area. There's a lot of low income families and if they are offered free wi-fi then that's more money they can use towards their rent, their groceries, or gas to get to work."
The money is part of a two year project that will create a network called Fam-G. That network will cover FAMU's 422 acre campus and the surrounding southside community.
FAMU Chief Information Officer Robert Seniors says the network will take 6 to 8 months to build, and once it's up and running it will be ten times faster than traditional broadband.
"What we believe will happen is it will enable collaboration, education, and learning anywhere, anytime."
Seniors says Fam-G will be available through a web based portal for students and surrounding community members. That means anyone who needs it can use it any time. Seniors says they expect it to help stimulate economic development.
"Having access to broadband changes live, and we believe having broadband internet access is the great equalizer."
Elliott says sometimes her customers have trouble accessing websites they need for school or work through her internet. Also occasionally her internet has outages which can cause her business to come to a halt.
"When comcast goes down here it takes out my music, it takes out my point of sale and it basically makes me pointless to be a café where internet is offered. So I lose money and I lose customers because they have to be able to go somewhere else to be able to do their homework."
So once Fam-G is available it can be a good backup to the service she already has at the café, and it will also benefit her at home.
"Sometimes when the service is out it's just out so it will be nice to have that in my neighborhood as well."
What the infrastructure will look like is still in the works, but when Fam-G is available you can literally just log into it from a web based portal. It's simple as that.
