Estimate towers and home receivers for free student internet during remote schooling

Since the pandemic, people have been working from home and schools have moved their classes online. Students have been given devices such as phones and tablets, but some of them have no Wi-Fi at home. Google wants to provide these students with free Wi-Fi. Pick a geographic area for this effort and explain why you picked it. Then estimate how many towers and how many boxes Google would need to serve the students in that area. ```hint Demand before network Work out how many students in your area actually need a connection, and how many homes that is, before you size anything. Then ask what limits the number of those students a single tower can serve. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - What counts as a box: one receiver per home that turns the tower's signal into household Wi-Fi, a portable hotspot per student, or a shared access point serving several homes? - Should the network serve only the homes of students without Wi-Fi, or everyone within reach of a tower once it is built? - What connection quality must each student get, for example enough for a live video class, and can several students in one home be in class at the same time? - May Google reuse existing structures such as cell sites, rooftops or school buildings, or should every tower be counted as new? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - A deliberate choice of area, justified by density, how many students lack home internet and how practical it is to deploy there. - A demand funnel from population to students without home internet to homes that need a box, with every assumption labeled and rounded. - A tower count that checks both how far a tower reaches and how much traffic it can carry at peak, and uses whichever needs more towers. - Clean arithmetic, a sanity check of the result, and a note of which assumptions move the answer most. - Awareness of the product side: alternatives to towers, how students get and install boxes, and what happens to the network when schools reopen. ### Follow-up Questions - If you had picked a sparsely populated rural county instead, which part of your estimate changes most, and are towers still the right technology? - Google can fund only a quarter of the towers you estimated. How do you decide which neighborhoods get coverage first? - Schools reopen in a year. How would you plan the rollout so the towers and boxes stay useful afterward?