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Datacenter Gives Internet To 70 Percent of Navajo Nation
Nerval's Lobster writes "The Navajo Nation cut the ribbon August 13 on an $8 million data center that has been under debate and development since 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton expressed shock that a 13-year-old Navajo girl who just won a new laptop couldn't connect to the Internet. At the time that girl won the laptop in a school contest, the Navajo Nation--a 27,425 square-mile region that covers portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico--had barely any IT infrastructure. The incident helped drive debate among leaders of the Navajo Nation, many of whom said they believed adding telecommunications and computing facilities were secondary to other concerns for the chronically poverty stricken region. The 50,000-square-foot facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico includes 25,000-sq.-ft. of datacenter and an equal space for computer training and business incubation, according to Nova Corp., an IT services company owned by Navajo Nation and formed in 2004 to execute an IT plan to create the "Digital Navajo Nation" (PDF). The drive to get it built also helped push development of a $46 million broadband project designed to cover about half of Navajo territory with 550 miles of fiber, 32 new cell towers and upgrades to another 27. It will eventually connect more than 30,000 households and 1,000 businesses."
I was going to say let's hope this gift doesn't come with viruses like those lousy blankets, way back when, but we know it will.
Exactly.
The problem is that like every other program like this, is that there is no real penalty for NOT doing what you were granted money to do. So you have all kinds of fly-by-night companies appying for and receiving grants, but they don't do anything except do studies and pay themselves. Nothing ever gets built, because it's quicker to take the money and run.
Rural broadband will only happen when the federal government does it THEMSELVES. Trying to get the "free market" to do things like this is impossible.
My understanding is that the Navajo Nation is as much a valid political entity as, say, the State of Wisconsin. Navajo Nation is almost but not completely unlike one of the 50 states in our Federal system. So if you Find and Replace "Wisconsin" into the parent post, it doesn't seem at all racist.
and now the NSA won't be able to read their email ...
While there is always debate about whether something like this is the best way to spend money in a poverty stricken area, one way it could help is if "rural sourcing" got started in the Navajo nation. That could include things like software development and call center work. No, it's not for everybody, but when a few people start making better money in a poverty stricken area it sometimes has a positive feed back effect. The newly employed hire someone else to work on their house or their truck, buy other local services, that sort of thing.
P.S. Now for a couple of things that you know people are dying to say (or groan about).
1. Finally, software written by real Indians.
2. In the future I want real Apaches working on the Apache server (hey, at least the Navajos are a related people).
That 13 year old girl doubled her lifetime waiting for the net, and her laptop may be a little bit obsolete by now - they should give her an upgrade for starting all this :)
It has a direct impact on education. And try to get a decent job in today's world without knowing at least basic Internet use.
Just wanted to post some fact check data here. I live 10 miles from the data center, was interviewed for a position there (turned down the consequent job offer) and am friends with the data center administrator. First of all, the article is incorrect - the data center is in Shiprock New Mexico on the Navajo Nation, NOT in Albuquerque. This is a 240+ mile difference. It's a common occurance that news articles written by people outside the area tend to make. Everyone not from New Mexico thinks that Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Taos are the only places in New Mexico. Also, the data center was not built with grant funds. The grant funds went towards the fiber optic project. NTUA, the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, invested their own capital to build the data center. In fact, what the ariticle does not make clear is that NTUA houses and manages the data center. What makes this unusual is that NTUA is the utility for the Navajo Nation (water, sewer, electricity, etc.). Building and running a data center is a little out of their core compentencies. Having said that, however, they've done an impressive job. The data center is state of the art and well built. They have power feeds from two different bulk electric utilities, two massive backup generators, two buildings of UPSs, and a state-of-the art NOC. What they don't have, in my humble opinion, is a completely fleshed out marketing team. But then I don't know exactly what their marketing strategy is anyway. As far as being racist goes, the only comment I've seen so far which I would say is blatantly racist is the one about "every liquor store in the region" putting up a website. That's kind of harsh, and is a really bad sterotype. Again, however, that's just my opinion. This is a free country after all.
If I want to know something, there's a good chance that I can learn it on the internet. It used to be that I had to go to a library to find information, sort through a card catalog for books that sound like they'd fit what I'm looking for, and actually do some serious research. Now? Pull up a search engine, and there's a good chance that I'll have the information I'm looking for in a matter of seconds.
"Thousands of years" ago, information was restricted by the practicality of reproducing it. That is, someone actually had to write out the scroll. Literacy wasn't common for most of the populace. Some 600 years ago, reproducing books became more practical, with the advent of movable type. It made more sense to have a more-educated populace. The Internet is another iteration on the ease of disseminating information. It makes finding information easier than books did before it. That being said, it's just another tool on the educational toolbelt.
Basically, you can't compare education millenia ago with education centuries ago. As the Internet leaves its infancy, you won't be able to compare learning and education a few decades from now to education a couple decades ago. The Internet allows so much higher ease of access to so much more information that a sensible comparison is difficult to make.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.