Enlarge / Seventy low-income and special needs units in this apartment complex will offer Plume-managed Wi-Fi. (credit: Michael Bennett Kress Photography)

Montgomery County, Maryland offers its low-income and special needs citizens Internet access via a 600-linear-mile fiber route as part of its Digital Equity program. In a new pilot project, the county will add onsite Wi-Fi—by way of Plume superpods —to its existing basic Internet access.

Digital Equity is defined as a condition in which all individuals in a society can access the technology needed to fully participate in our society, democracy, and economy. The Office of Broadband Programs (OBP) is taking steps towards achieving digital equity in Montgomery County, through programs such as expanding broadband services, educating seniors, and aiding individuals in connecting to the internet.

—Montgomery County Office of Broadband Programs

Ars spoke to Montgomery County's Chief Broadband Officer, Joe Webster, about the upcoming project. Webster told us that although the county has been providing free or low-cost Internet service to residents in need for some time, significant challenges remain beyond the demarc. If you're unfamiliar with the term, "demarc" is ISP shorthand for "point of demarcation"—the point beyond which your IT problems are your own, not the service provider's.

Wi-Fi is a particular pain point, and the low-income and special needs citizens served by Joe's office face particular challenges trying to set up and administer in-home Wi-Fi, due to both the expense and complexity. Ongoing support of in-home Wi-Fi is also a challenging and expensive proposition—network equipment vendor Actiontec claims 60 percent of all ISP support calls are really for Wi-Fi, not the Internet service itself.

Enlarge / We expect the new Eero Pro to look largely like the existing Eero Pro or the Amazon Eero units shown here. (credit: Jim Salter)

Tech blog Zatz Not Funny broke the news this weekend that Wi-Fi 6-enabled Eero hardware is at the FCC for testing and validation . Details on the new hardware are sketchy for the moment—Eero has requested confidentiality for most of the interesting data through March 10, 2021.

What we do know is that three devices under test are listed—an Eero Pro, Eero Gateway, and Eero Extender. All three are Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax)-enabled parts. The Eero Pro is a tri-band design (one 2.4GHz radio and two 5GHz radios), similar to the current Eero Pro; the Gateway and Extender are dual-band designs differentiated by wired Ethernet ports—the Gateway has two, and the Extender has none.

Ars has reached out to Eero, with no response as of press time. All we know for sure is what limited nonconfidential data is available from RF testing at the FCC—Eero's site itself still simply says "there is no timeline set for 802.11ax (also known as Wi-Fi 6) support."