It was several weeks into school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic when Dave Peterson looked out his office window at Washington’s Sunnyside School District and saw something unusual: A young man was sitting outside his house, trying to connect to Zoom over a smartphone hotspot so he could sign in to class. Then his sister came out and did the same; then his younger brother.
“Three kids trying to log on to Zoom from the same smartphone wasn’t going to cut it,” says Peterson, the district’s IT coordinator. He had an extra outdoor access point sitting on the floor in his office, so he…