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It is 60 miles to the nearest town with net access.

So I will venture that town has fiber.

Fiber can be run close to 200 miles without a line amp.

A cpl of Asynchronous Xfer Mode cards for each end are a
few hundred bucks, and some older refurb Cisco gear and
your good to go.

An OC-3 in the town 60 miles away from the local
carrier will cost less than $10,000/mo. and give them
155 Mbps that they can hookup to a Squid Box to
use as caching mechanism to save on xmitting the
same data twice to two different hosts.

Local cable TV companies ran their fiber in aerial protected
cabling with a strength enhancing strand down the center.

When you consider how much aerial fiber the cable companies
ran in major cities, I'd say it is easily doable.

The Navajo should contract it out.

For 2.25 billion I dare say they could do their own Coop ISP
like some other ppl have done around the US.

http://www.coop.net/

And when they run it run multi-strand in case one fiber pair
has issues at some point in the future.

In fact I bet as a PR stunt Cisco would come out and profile
the whole setup for them.

Just my two cents...

Fiber Optics has been around for quite some time, after the DOT COM bust
it became relatively cheap . And the majority of fiber in the ground
is not even lit . It is known as dark fiber .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber

What would be best is for the ppl to do an end around the greed matrix .

Make a Internet Cooperative, some already exist now and are doing well .

http://www.coop.net/ and http://www.ncic.net/

As tax payers we paid $200 billion USD in taxes to the major telcos to deploy
fiber to every major US city, we were defrauded, the details are here :

http://www.newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm

If we want internet access like a regulated utility, but without the the government
screwing it up, our best option is a Coop .

A good example of this banking and insurance wise is USAA for military ppl .

When power was deregulated in california it just ended up a giant mess .

The FCC has been manipulated by companies like sprint that tried their best to
keep the GSM cellular system used by the rest of the world out of the US
so their proprietary version could maintain a monoply .

This is common knowledge among those that worked in Telecom, and there
are other examples of the corporations using strong arm tactics and
lobbyists to get what is best for their bottom lines .

When lobbyists and corporate greed mold the policy for our telecom
system nationwide it will not be in the best interest of the ppl at large,
just the largess of a corrupt few, like the piece of crap CEO from global crossing .

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/11 /184102.shtml

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/2/11 /161838.shtml

http://www.newsmax.com/scripts/showinside.pl?a=200 2/2/12/92546

Millions and billions of dollars just pissed away due to greed, corruption,
and poor management of resources . The status quo is not getting it done right .

Ex-MislTech

Your co-op will not exist without those 51% approving it, which is where I came in to this movie.

http://www.coop.net/

A little research goes a lot further than a little rhetoric .

Ex-MislTech

Of cheap internet access. A while ago parts of the community came together to form The colorado internet co-op. In fact, if you look at the network diagram of this group, they use nettrack, which also has a connection to the co-op.

Some of the more prominant Unixers on the co-op board are Trent Hein, and Evi Nemeth (two of the authors of the USAH) was also involved. The CO-OP has played a nice part in keeping colorado up and wired.

It would also be nice, now, if the government could help facilitate future growth via funded expansion of shared infrastructure. Broadband access is apparently become less readily available and more costly, right at a time when demand for access is increasing.

As long as you are talking about extremely local governments, or even stuff smaller than governments at the community level, that's fine. But you don't really need government at all. Government is the lazy man's solution, an attempt to get someone else to pay for it. Look at that neighborhood fiber network in Sweden or the Coop in Colorado and you'll see that the problem can be solved just by having people get off their asses and doing something about it. And if we're not willing to spend the money directly and efficiently in our own communities, how dare we ask that it be done indirectly with federal taxes by unaccountable fund-siphoning middlemen beaurocratic grifters? (Oops, I think my anti-fed bias is showing. ;-)

We don't need no stinking federal network. The only problems are with the "last mile". At higher levels above that, the private sector can very easily handle the job.

Here is a group that has done a coop (of sorts...). Link

The colorado internet co-op has been around for a good long while, and a fair number of ISP's in colorado (most of them If I remember corectly) get their bandwidth from coop. Coop is more of a backbone provider then anything else. Check out
Colorado internet co-op

There's one out in Boulder, the Colorado Internet Co-op. Unfortunately, their prices are rather higher.