When Martha Wright’s grandson was moved to a prison outside of her hometown of Washington, D.C., she didn’t expect that a short 5-minute conversation with him could cost up to $18.

“You just have to get everything out in one line,” she laughs.

I recently wrote about a local effort to build a wireless community network in Mount Pleasant, Washington, D.C. In April I chatted with Bill Comisky, the first neighbor-link in the Mount Pleasant Community Wireless Network (MtPCWN), a grassroots approach to providing wireless access to the neighborhood.

Since the 1990s, digital inclusion discourse has come a long way in addressing the role of social context and social infrastructures in making Internet access meaningful. Scholars, such as Dailey, et al. (2010), Selwyn (2004), Hargittai (2002), Warschauer (2002), and DiMaggio and Hargittai (2001), demonstrated that going online requires more than a live wire into the home. According to these works, digital inclusion requires attention to individual skills and know–how, social and community support systems, and results in various modes of access.

The migration of job applications, payment systems and government documents online makes high-speed broadband access a necessity for all communities. Faced with the high prices of services and lagging connection speeds offered by incumbent providers, more and more cities around the country are building their own broadband networks to meet the needs of their residents, businesses and public institutions. Empowering communities to control their own communication infrastructure is one of the core values of OTI.