TechTalk

24/10/2007 In Broadband Wireless, Just ! Me by Brad Slavin

Today I got to make a difference in the lives of people who were affected by the San Diego Fires. Skyriver Communications choose to come to the aide of the community by providing Free WiFi Internet Access to the people who were displaced by this emergency.

We installed two major hotspots at the Del Mar Fairgrounds to provide Internet access to the evacuees, the press by the main grandstand and to the pet owners at the stables.

Click to see all of the pictures of the Skyriver Volunteer Effort

I was amazed to see how many people were responding to this crisis and just how organized the people at the Del Mar Fair seemed to be. There was an efficient drop-off location for food, clothing and other necessities and a process for sorting the items out into specific categories and distributing to those in need.

It took a few hours for us to install our links, but once they were up and Lisa and I had finished walking the grandstands to tell people about our free hotspots there were about seven people connected within 15 minutes.

UPDATE -

As of today November 26th those displaced by the fires who were situated at Qualcomm Stadium have been moved to the Del Mar Fair. We have verified that the HotSpots are functioning normally and we are hoping that everyone has uninterrupted Internet access. We labeled all access points with an SSID: SKYRIVER-FREE-WIFI just to make sure that everyone knew that it was free to use.

The whole company came together to support the San Diego community in the best way that we know how. We wanted to make sure that it there was even a slight possibility that providing free Internet could make someones life a little easier that we needed to be a part of the solution.