Tacoma will be added to the coverage area of Althea, focusing its investments in infrastructure and installations in the Hilltop neighborhood.
The mission of Althea is to provide affordable broadband connectivity for everyone as the company believes that it strengthens economic growth and communities, access to healthcare, and educational opportunities.
Althea works with network operators and local communities to provide sustainable low cost and high-speed broadband access. The infrastructure, technology, and routing protocol that Althea employs is unique in that it enables its service to be almost entirely automated and maximizes utilization of bandwidth.
The Hilltop neighborhood was a proof-of-concept network for the company. In 2020, it worked with the University of Washington and the Racoma Cooperative Network to build and test community-led Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks. Consequently, the company developed an embedded LTE core inside one of their home routers, which provides the flexibility to build and grow LTE/5G networks anywhere in an affordable and speedy manner. Announcements of such new services and access are often made known throughout a community with poster printing.
CEO of Althea, Deborah Simpier, said that often people do not have access to the Internet due to costs and other barriers. Simpier added that the company believes that access to the Internet is a basic right which is the reason why the company provide a free, always-on tier of Internet access.
