In the wake of COVID, people are searching for connections. Between quarantine, remote work, and distance learning, there’s an opportunity to provide a space that is designed for this new normal. Enter the wiDistrict, short for wireless district in Hartford, Connecticut. These areas provide enterprise-grade, high speed, and exceptionally reliable public wifi, suitable for a variety of uses but built to support remote learning and remote work.

The Pratt Street wiDistrict concept grew out of two frustrations. When Blue Haus Group’s founder noticed that he had grown tired of working from home and needed another location that had good wifi, but could also socially distance. The second frustration was watching downtown businesses, which are typically supported by downtown employees – suffer. A recent article highlighting the effects on Seattle’s downtown estimated that “Before Covid-19, 310,000 people worked downtown every day. Even a 10%-20% reduction will have a major impact on the businesses that rely on commuters”.

Recognizing the critical role that daytime employees play in the downtown ecosystem, it became clear that Blue Haus, a private real estate and economic development firm with a focus on creating dynamic urban cores within secondary and tertiary markets, needed to find a way to draw people downtown. Couple that with a recent Axios report which highlighted the mental health impact on families featuring survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, we recognized there was a need in the marketplace for a third place.

Realizing that individuals have been reduced from three spaces (home, work, coffee-shop/library) to a single space, the idea quickly evolved into providing people with a “second space” to work and learn remotely in a responsible and socially distanced environment. A secondary benefit would be an increase in downtown foot traffic to benefit brick and mortar businesses in the district.

With that concept in mind, we set out to find appropriate partners. Initially, we approached Shelbourne Global Solutions, a real estate organization that owns the buildings on the south side of the street. We laid out our case and how we expected that it would help their tenants. As developers, we’ve worked with them in the past as they are pretty forward-thinking and open to new ideas. Once we had their interest, we set out to find an IT partner. We reached out to Backstage Networks, a company that we had worked with previously. They specialize in the rapid deployment of high-grade wireless internet. Once we discussed our vision with them, they completed a quick survey of the street and the needed resources and delivered an amazing product in 14 days.

The deployment can support 300 individuals on the network with an additional 25% capacity if needed. The bandwidth that we have is enterprise-grade with a 99% uptime. We can support hundreds of people simultaneously on zoom calls or remote learning platforms.

In the first 20 days of service, the district has seen a significant increase in foot traffic and can provide the statistics to back it up. Out of about 1000 logins to the network, the average use time has grown from 4 minutes to 20 minutes.

Businesses have seen a slight uptick in foot traffic. Additional funding was secured through the local Business Improvement District to keep the program running through the fall and there has been talk of adding additional programs. Most of all, the businesses have been happy to see some tangible efforts on the street level. The wiDistrict is a practical solution to support economic development as well as mental health as Hartford, Conn continues to manage the impacts of COVID-19.