How McAllen Deployed 1,000 Access Points in 60 Days

The problem

In August 2020, McAllen's schools reopened remote-only. Every student in McAllen ISD had carried a district-issued device for nine years — but more than 25% of McAllen residents live below the poverty line, roughly 70% of the district's students are economically disadvantaged, and in-home connectivity simply wasn't there. Families were parking outside fast-food restaurants and city parks to reach Wi-Fi. The city's existing public access amounted to 14 scattered hotspots covering a small fraction of 140,000 people, in a county hit harder by COVID-19 than the national average.

"Our main challenge was in our low-income and underserved neighborhoods who were going to be slow to receive cable TV, broadband or Wi-Fi," McAllen Mayor Jim Darling said at the time. "That made it impossible for kids to go to school remotely, or for parents to get training or work from home."

The design: CBRS backbone, Wi-Fi edge

Fiber to a thousand pole tops in two months wasn't happening. Shared spectrum was the unlock. The architecture I designed pairs a CBRS fixed-wireless backbone — 24 Cambium PMP 450m base stations mounted on city water towers, blanketing McAllen — with more than 1,000 Cambium cnPilot e700 outdoor Wi-Fi access points on utility and light poles in the neighborhoods that needed them most. Federated Wireless provided SAS spectrum-controller services at no cost, and the whole network is centrally managed in the cloud through Cambium's cnMaestro.

Why CBRS? Because it delivers on the band's original promise: extending real connectivity to communities the fiber maps forgot, without waiting on spectrum auctions or utility trenching. The Wi-Fi edge meant every family could connect the devices they already owned — no CPE installs, no truck rolls, no monthly bill.

The build: 60 days, plus 14 for grace

The City of McAllen brought Frontera Consulting in with 60 days to design, engineer, and build the network. We got the call, we took the deadline, and we put roughly a thousand nodes in the air — site design, RF planning, pole agreements, mounting, backhaul, and commissioning — with the city granting an extra 14 days at the finish. As City Manager Roel "Roy" Rodriguez, P.E. later put it: "The nodes were installed by Frontera Consulting in a matter of weeks and the community-wide, fixed wireless, outdoor Wi-Fi access network served, and continues to serve, thousands of students, faculty, and citizens."

What it delivered

"Every child, parent and senior citizen who needs connectivity now has it," Mayor Darling said. "When you look at McAllen, we're now not only a 'Connected City,' we're a digital leader." McAllen ISD superintendent Dr. J.A. Gonzalez called it a network that "is going to transform our community, allowing our students to connect to their classes virtually... regardless of their backgrounds, circumstances or the challenges they face at home."

The network still runs today — free, city-wide, serving students, faculty, and residents.

Recognition

• Cambium Networks Connectivity Hero of the Year (2020) — awarded to Drew Lentz for the McAllen deployment.
• Cambium Networks Connectivity Award (2021) — to the City of McAllen.
• NATOA Digital Equity Award (2022) — to the City of McAllen from the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors.

Coverage & sources

• My original 2021 write-up with the full announcement
• Fierce Network: "CBRS bridges digital divide for McAllen, Texas"
• Rio Grande Guardian: the City Manager on the project
• Deployment video · Frontera project video
• More field reports: Downtown Juneau — 103,245 users on high-density public Wi-Fi

Frequently asked