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Microsoft Aims To Bring Internet To Rural Tribal Lands In Washington, Montana (greatfallstribune.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the more-the-merrier dept.

Microsoft has announced an agreement with Native Network to provide broadband internet access to nearly 73,500 people without service in rural communities in Montana and Washington. Great Falls Tribune reports: This is part of the Microsoft Airband Initiative, which aims to extend broadband access to 2 million people in unserved portions of rural America by July 4, 2022, officials said. Unused parts of the broadcast spectrum are used to help rural communities access the internet. Through the partnership, Native Network will provide affordable hybrid fixed wireless broadband internet access, including TV White Spaces, to tribes within Flathead Reservation in Montana as well as Lummi Nation and Swinomish Tribe in Washington. It will come to rural Americans through commercial partnerships and investment in digital skills training for people. Proceeds from Airband connectivity projects will be reinvested into the program to expand broadband to more rural areas, officials said. "Broadband is the electricity of the 21st century and is critical for farmers, small business owners, health care practitioners, educators and students to thrive in today's digital economy," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a news release. "We are excited about the partnership with Native Network which will help close the digital divide in rural Montana and Washington, bringing access to approximately 73,500 people within and around the tribal communities."

53 comments

  1. No, Its my connection not yours... by Arzaboa · · Score: 1

    How fun to be able to tell your friends that your internet is down because you are in between balloons.

    --
    Meetings! Meetings! Meetings! Do they ever achieve anything or do they just let a lot of hot air out of an already over inflated balloon? Anthony T.Hincks

  2. Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Plants don't grow without Netflix?

    1. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My parents own a farm. When my mom asked me to fix her tractor, I found a YouTube video that showed exactly how to do it. I put my laptop on a hay bale, and stepped through the video, pausing while I completed each step.

      If she didn't have broadband, I would have had to drive into town, about 8 miles each way, and use the Wifi at McDonalds, and just hope I was recording the correct video.

    2. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      nowadays everything from tractors to ploughs and seeders are all computerised and networked, add in weather forecasts and monitoring, farms are heavily computerised and networked.

    3. Re: Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Asshole.

    4. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well in rural New Zealand, which might not be as vast but isn't that populated we solved those problems 10 years ago.

      I want to rant and provide jabs but the crux is: America is about to loose hegemony to China and it's way to far in debt and small in size to even hope military power will sustain the debt economy. The system hasn't achieved since the end of the cold war. Too many citizens are worse off and the population is divided.

      We risk it too, but seriously, we're all people.

    5. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by terrycarlino · · Score: 1

      Not throwing stones here but New Zealand is smaller than three of the U.S. states. Wiring rural America is a order of magnitude problem bigger than wiring New Zealand.

      It similar to our wireless problem. New Zealand is 103,483 sq. miles. The U.S. 3,797,000 sq. miles. These things don't scale well.

      More people are better off than any time in our history. We've got record levels of unemployment and penetration of devices like mobile phones is staggering. So claiming people are worse off is just wrong.

      The U.S. has always been divided. When people have the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to disagree they will. Every generation acts as if this division is something new, but those who know their history realize it isn't. We're great mostly because we are different. Diversity is our strength.

    6. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Saunalainen · · Score: 1

      Wiring up the US is indeed a much bigger problem than wiring NZ, but you also have proportionally more resources to spend on it.

      The economics of broadband depend on population density - it's more expensive to connect the same number of people over a greater distance.

      Population of US: 320 million; area 4 million sq miles; population density 80 per square mile.

      Population of NZ: 4 million, area 103 sq. miles, population density 40 people per square mile.

      New Zealand has HALF the population density of the US, so connecting it up is actually MORE difficult (per capita).

      And these things DO scale well: revenue, and workforce, is proportional to population size. Wiring up two towns is only twice the cost of wiring up one town

      (Of course, things are slightly more complicated because you also need to connect up the two towns. However, those overheads only scale logarithmically with population size so are much less important. Also, there's an economy of scale I didn't take account of in the above: length of wiring is not proportional to area, but to linear size (square root area)).

    7. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by El+Cubano · · Score: 2

      New Zealand has HALF the population density of the US, so connecting it up is actually MORE difficult (per capita).

      What you say is a non sequitur. For example, the least densely populated county in Rhode Island (385.67/sq mi) is more densely populated the most densely populated counties in Nevada (382.09/sq mi), Idaho, Mississippi, Maine, Vermont, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming (34.15/sq mi). All the stats are here.

      That indicates that while the average US population density is twice that of NZ, the imbalance (i.e., density of densely populated areas compared to density of sparsely populated areas) is far greater in the US. I think the grand-parent post had it right. It is far more difficult to solve the rural access problem in the US than in NZ. Of course, I'll bet that in comparison Russia's problem are quite a bit worse than the US's problems in this regard.

    8. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      My parents own a farm. When my mom asked me to fix her tractor, I found a YouTube video that showed exactly how to do it.

      Don't worry, the tractor manufacturers will solve this problem for you. Soon enough, you won't be allowed to work on your own tractor, and even if you did it anyway, the parts would refuse to interoperate.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    9. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ' but you also have proportionally more resources to spend on it.'

      You mean. you _would_ have more resources if you _would_ pay taxes.

    10. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Saunalainen · · Score: 1

      What you say is a non sequitur.

      I agree that population density is not a perfect predictor of the difficulty in implementing broadband, but it's much more relevant that just stating how big the country is - which is what the great-great-grandposter I was responding to was doing.

      That indicates that while the average US population density is twice that of NZ, the imbalance (i.e., density of densely populated areas compared to density of sparsely populated areas) is far greater in the US.

      That'd definitely a non-sequitur - you haven't provided any data on NZ to support that.

      If we're going to be picky, then none of the population density data you or I could come up with will give a watertight prediction of the cost of implementing broadband. An empty field more sparsely populated (zero population density) than any county in the US. But note that a more heterogeneously distributed population is not necessarily more expensive to wire up than a more uniform one - quite the opposite, in fact. Vast uninhabited wastes do not need broadband at all; the individual cost of wiring up a small number of isolated people is high, but the cost per head of population in the country can be low. Meanwhile, the flip side of an uneven population distribution is that many people live close to each other, so are cheaper to wire up.

    11. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by El+Cubano · · Score: 1

      That'd definitely a non-sequitur - you haven't provided any data on NZ to support that.

      Good point. I did not even try to find those figures and just found data to support my position. After reading your reply, I took a look at the population density map on the Demographics of New Zealand Wikipedia article. It is difficult to tell just going by that, but it sure seems like there are far fewer high concentration urban areas in New Zealand than most places in the US. It does say that 86% of the population lives in those urban areas and the remaining 14% in rural areas, which appear to be less dense than the typical rural area in the US. I would expect that it would be fairly difficult to connect those people.

      That said, even though the two situations look more comparable than I initially considered (at least from a population density and dispersion perspective), the matter of scale is huge (no pun intended). The solution is not immediately apparent to me.

      If we're going to be picky, then none of the population density data you or I could come up with will give a watertight prediction of the cost of implementing broadband. An empty field more sparsely populated (zero population density) than any county in the US. But note that a more heterogeneously distributed population is not necessarily more expensive to wire up than a more uniform one - quite the opposite, in fact. Vast uninhabited wastes do not need broadband at all; the individual cost of wiring up a small number of isolated people is high, but the cost per head of population in the country can be low. Meanwhile, the flip side of an uneven population distribution is that many people live close to each other, so are cheaper to wire up.

      Of course, while Internet infrastructure gets more expensive as the population spreads out, other things are the reverse. For instance, produce and other fresh grocery items (e.g., milk, OJ, etc.) are more expensive in NYC than they are in, say, Lake Charles, Louisiana. I guess on thing that I never realized is that the market economy tends to favor those things with a cost gradient toward higher population density (higher density is also an indicator of higher overall incomes) than those things with a cost gradient in the other direction.

    12. Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Like printer ink cartridges! Genius! Award that man a patent!

    13. Re: Broadband is "critical" for farmers? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When your empty fields contain grape vines or fruit trees, soon they will require live video feed (in visible, uv and infrared) as well as some data for humidity/temperature sensors etc. And the other way for water control etc. Don't need a fast refresh rate but it's going to raise the RF floor in rural areas if most of the traffic is relayed in a mesh.

  3. In truth, it isn't broadband by jd · · Score: 2

    The US defines anything faster than a Morse code buzzer as broadband, but speed is relative not to Comcast but to computers.

    Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband, whatever the FCC says.

    Microsoft has built networks before. They failed because they care nothing for quality and hardware is unforgiving of failures.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband, whatever the FCC says.

      You don't get to come over all pedantic while abusing the meaning of the word "broadband". Either go all in on pedantry, or let it go.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    2. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by gtall · · Score: 1

      I thought something similar. Haven't we done enough to the tribal lands already without afflicting them with MS? If the Fed. Gov. was doing its job, then they'd already be properly wired. No chance of that happening now.

    3. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by greenwow · · Score: 1

      > Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband,

      Did you mean megabit per second? A lot of the country can't get connections that fast. I'm at a friend's apartment now that lives a few hundred yards from Microsoft Redwest. Frontier is the phone monopoly here, and they only offer 1.5 Mbps DSL in his complex which is faster than what I have at home right now.

    4. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by Kjella · · Score: 1

      The US defines anything faster than a Morse code buzzer as broadband, but speed is relative not to Comcast but to computers. Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband, whatever the FCC says.

      Because... random big number? Broadband should be a meaningful number to people, not computers. For example if every member of the average US household (2.6, let's round to 3) can watch Netflix in UHD (25 Mbit/person) the US average length (5 hours/day) which works out 1.7 TB/month but let's round up to 100 Mbit @ 2 TB cap. Preferably on fiber, no "up to" bullshit like with DSL/cable. I actually have a 250 Mbps line now and it's basically nice to have, when there's a huge game patch it'll finish in two minutes instead of five but honestly I'd do just fine with less.

      Usually the problem is that the rest of the Internet can't keep up, if something actually runs at >10 MB/s that's a CD in a minute and re-downloading GTA V (65GB) takes two hours. I suppose you could always say why not 10Gbit and two minutes, but that's really solving first world problems. Of course if they first install a fiber node they're all gigabit capable now and I don't think the flowing bits cost much at all so maybe I'll upgrade to that some day. But as it is the premium doesn't seem worth it and I'm nerdier than 99% of the population.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    5. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by jd · · Score: 1

      No, speeds have to be relative to something.

      Let's say we use requirements. Almost no machine is going to handle a megabit per second without serious starvation problems. Computer busses typically run at 25-50 gigabits per second per lane, with up to 32 lanes. That's local speed.

      We can measure speeds relative to that. That's a perfectly good method, lots of engineering is done in relative units.

      Or we can use the speeds of competing systems. Broadband is intermediate. Chattanooga, TN, recently upgraded to 10 gigabits per second and parts of rural Sweden are at 50 gigabits per second.

      I'd call 10-50 gigabit speeds fast. But if we do that, then CAT5-CAT6 Ethernet speeds (100 megabits - 10 gigabits) must be intermediate.

      Everything below is ergo slow.

      1.5 megabits DSL is ludicrous. I assume it's ADSL. My suspicion is that you'll find they're offering 10 Mbps SDSL to businesses in the area. ADSL could easily be run at the same speed as SDSL - actually, it could be run faster, as you've very little traffic coming the other way.

      You are set at such a low speed because the provider can get away with it. If they didn't come to your house and adjust the speed to get maximum signal strength, you're being robbed. Even if they did, if they didn't bother with a decent modem at the office, you can't get decent speeds and are still being robbed.

      Current speed on installed fibre is 111 terabits per second, but apparently they've just increased that five fold. Your area will be served by one cable. You need an awful lot of houses before the best you can do is 1 megabit per second.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    6. Re: In truth, it isn't broadband by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      Why the feds? You would think the profits from a single casino would be enough to roll out broadband to half the reserves in the USA. How in the world is this a federal responsibility?

    7. Re: In truth, it isn't broadband by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      You're being ridiculous. I have a 50 Mbps connection and that is absolutely broadband. I could get a faster one if I wanted it, but why the hell would I pay more money? So that my Debian ISO can finish downloading in 2 minutes instead of 5? Don't be retarded.

      My home network runs at 1 gigabit and I can't even saturate that unless I really try. Sure my file server can technically push out files at 3 times that speed, but what's the point when none of the hard drives on the client machines can write at faster than about 0.8 gbps? And you're telling me that the average home needs a connection that is faster than that? Fuck off. Maybe in 20 years we will actually need gigabit speeds for every house; until then it's just a nice-to-have.

    8. Re: In truth, it isn't broadband by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      You would think the profits from a single casino would be enough to roll out broadband to half the reserves in the USA.

      A few tribes run casinos but most do not. Many reservations are in remote areas with no customer base for gaming. Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota, which contains the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is the poorest county in America.

      The more prosperous tribes have little interest in helping less fortunate tribes. There is little solidarity. One of my co-workers is a Crow Indian, and she was raised on the Crow Reservation near Billings, Montana. According to her, the Crow were on the verge of extermination in a genocidal war with the Sioux and Cheyenne. It was only the arrival of white soldiers that save their tribe. They allied with the American Army, and Crow warriors died fighting with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. She doesn't give a crap about the plight of the Lakota Sioux at Pine Ridge.

    9. Re: In truth, it isn't broadband by jd · · Score: 1

      First, you're not going to get UHDTV over a 10 megabit link. You're not going to get very good HDTV over that.

      Second, most of the world is on links faster than yours. What are you going to do, have broader band, broader-than-broad band and mega broadband? Sounds like a line of clothing for Texans. You have to rate things by what actually exists in the field. Gigabit to the home pioneered in Japan somewhere around 2000. You're eighteen years behind.

      Ten gigabits to the home FOR LESS THAN YOU ARE PAYING can be found in some towns in America, although the cable companies have done their damnest to have such things banned. The fact is, those providers exist and you would not be paying more, you'd be paying less.

      You don't think you'd use it? Don't be so sure. Even back in 1991, I was regularly maxing out a 100 megabit Ethernet. Between TV, telephony, X11, and software development with a NAS, you can generate a fair bit. (Yes, you could get TV on the Internet in '91. The application was nv, it supported PAL and NTSC transmissions, and was generally pretty good.)

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    10. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by jd · · Score: 1

      No, because a name has to be in relation to something.

      You basically have four lanes of Internet traffic - slow, basic, broadband and high-speed. You don't want more than four categories.

      You peg the top of the highest category to the highest speed that can be accessed by residential users outside of any R&D scenario. That's currently 50 gigabits per second.

      You peg the base of the highest category to the highest speed that can be accessed by a significant number of users. That's currently 10 gigabits per second.

      This is perfectly reasonable, because it defines an actual meaningful experience and a non-trivial identifiable segment of the population. Because we're not using absolutes, it has nothing to do with computers, it has to do with relative experience of the user.

      We peg the base of the next highest category to be the highest speed that both defines a significant number of population centres - cities, towns, etc - and can be meaningfully delivered to those machines these days, that's a gigabit per second.

      Basic is sensibly defined as being the bulk experience of users who are getting the lowest service the ISPs can provide using current facilities. What you are getting is very basic indeed. It's hard to deliver anything that slow unless you're using technology from the 1980s or 1990s. That's an experience, because that is by definition where most people will be.

      Slow is anything that uses equipment that really can't be maintained because it's obsolete. That, too, is an experience. It limits your ability to do things by merit of nobody accounting for the possibility.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    11. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by jd · · Score: 1

      UHDTV is 4K or 8K. 8.3 megapixels or 33.2 megapixels. 24 bits per pixel. 30 frames per second. 6 or 24 gigabits of data, respectively.

      You can compress it, with loss of quality. But you're never going to compress it to the degree you're claiming.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    12. Re: In truth, it isn't broadband by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      A few tribes run casinos but most do not. Many reservations are in remote areas with no customer base for gaming. Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota, which contains the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, is the poorest county in America.

      I'm aware of that; my point was that there's no reason why the feds should be responsible for this. I wouldn't expect the federal government to step in and provide broadband service to some hillbillies in kentucky; no reason for them to be providing it to any native tribe either.

      The more prosperous tribes have little interest in helping less fortunate tribes. There is little solidarity.

      I'm aware of this also, which is why it makes me laugh when sjws and such try to make these kinds of things into a "white man vs The Natives" issue.

    13. Re: In truth, it isn't broadband by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      First, you're not going to get UHDTV over a 10 megabit link. You're not going to get very good HDTV over that.

      Nonsense. Netflix does good quality HDTV at 5mbps. Using HEVC that could be further reduced to 3mbps.

      UHDTV is a different ballgame but even that only requires 25 Mbps. This could, again, be reduced down to around 15 or so with HEVC. That's still a fuck of a long way away from gigabit speed.

      Second, most of the world is on links faster than yours.

      According to the latest figures I could find, something like half of the people in this world have NO internet access, so I'm going to say that this claim of yours is a load of shit.

      What are you going to do, have broader band, broader-than-broad band and mega broadband?

      No, I'm going to call it all broadband and then list the speed. You know, the way we've been doing it for over a decade now.

      Gigabit to the home pioneered in Japan somewhere around 2000. You're eighteen years behind.

      All of Japan could fit inside my home province, with enough room left over for two more Japans. Yet their population is 4 times larger than my entire country, and almost 10 times larger than my province. What Japan did in 2000 has dick all to do with what we can do here. Nor does it have any bearing on what we actually NEED, let alone what we should call it.

      Also the gigabit standard wasn't even defined until 1998, so the idea that home connections at gigabit speeds were available in Japan 2 years later seems rather absurd. I guess by "available" you mean that the rich could pay to put one in, the same way I could buy a T3 line for $20,000 per month around that time.

      Ten gigabits to the home FOR LESS THAN YOU ARE PAYING can be found in some towns in America, although the cable companies have done their damnest to have such things banned. The fact is, those providers exist and you would not be paying more, you'd be paying less.

      That's wonderful for them. It still has nothing to do with anything.

      Also I googled it; 10 gigabit to home costs far, far more than I'm paying, so again you're just way off.

      You don't think you'd use it? Don't be so sure. Even back in 1991, I was regularly maxing out a 100 megabit Ethernet. Between TV, telephony, X11, and software development with a NAS, you can generate a fair bit. (Yes, you could get TV on the Internet in '91. The application was nv, it supported PAL and NTSC transmissions, and was generally pretty good.)

      x11 and telephony generate insignificant amounts of traffic for home use; the fact that you would even mention them in the context of this discussion is hilarious. As far as TV goes, codecs were shit in 91 which is why you can now compress a 4.5 GB DVD down to something like 500 megabytes without appreciable quality loss. Of course DVDs weren't even a thing until the late 90s so I have no fucking clue what kind of compression your TV thingy was using; whatever it was it still has zero bearing on what we are doing today.

      Just to put things into perspective, the average hard drive in 1991 was 40 megabytes. The largest possible drive you could have had would have been 240 MB. Maxing out your 100mbit connection with file transfers would have meant that you would have filled those drives in 3.2 seconds, and 19.2 seconds respectively. Except, of course, that you could never have done that because the drive speeds themselves were only in the neighbourhood of around 7 mbps; less than a tenth of your 100 Mbit Ethernet.

      Which, of course, brings us to your 100 megabit Ethernet itself ... which you claim to have magically had in 1991 despite the fact that the actual 802.3u standard wasn't formalized until 1995, and consumer devices didn't start appearing until some time after that.

      All of which means that you're either horribly confused about a lot of stuff, or totally full of shit, or some combination of the two.

    14. Re:In truth, it isn't broadband by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's the local monopolies and costs of laying transmission lines in both cities and rural areas. The US needs reliable wireless broadband technology to solve the issue of rural areas as well as competition.

  4. Re: That's great by jd · · Score: 1

    Really? Is that the best troll you can manage? I saw better trolls on alt.flame -- after people stopped using it.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  5. Very clever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The obstacles to this aren't technical, but being Sovereign nations for an uncertain value of Sovereign they can tell the FCC and Telco's to take a long walk on a short pier.

     

    1. Re:Very clever by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      being Sovereign nations ... they can tell the FCC and Telco's to take a long walk

      The FCC is federal, and has jurisdiction on Indian land.

      State laws are subordinate to tribal law, but federal laws are not.

    2. Re: Very clever by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      PK Dick paraphrase :

      "We can do it to you wholesale"

  6. No more flyovers on the internet please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    We don't need any more flyovers posting their bumpkin religious nonsense on the internet.

  7. Re: That's great by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

    Really? Is that the best troll you can manage?

    I was hoping that somebody would post a nice troll about Microsoft using "white spaces" on tribal land.

  8. Please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    keep it away from religious nazi assholes

    1. Re:Please by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Agreed. The uneducated rural populations have demonstrated they can't handle the internet, and may never be ready for it.

  9. Vested in increased rural techno propaganda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The real issues are mused over offline with peace, objectivity, a book and a coffee (cofveve), without the megaphones of propaganda from Google and Twitter.

    This is an attempt to increase the frequency of mainstream fake news in rural "uneducated" areas and to consolidate the grip of federal centralization in these areas later.

  10. Good work Microsoft by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I find this great news to help out our own in gaining internet access. The sparseness of these communities means that mainstream options probably will never find it financially practical to invest in it.

  11. F'kin awesome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is f'kin great. Now in addition to drugs and alcohol, we can flood tribal lands with pr0n as well!

    What better way to keep a people subjugated than to keep them drunk, stoned, and fapping all the time?

    Way to go, MURKA!

  12. americans can't stop sharting in walmart by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    While you make excuses as to why america is exceptional, China and to a lesser extent Russia, get on with the mundane task of infrastructure building, despite being larger, poorer, and even more rural.

    Go on, move the goalpost and make another excuse as to why mutts can't do infrastructure to save their lives.

    1. Re: americans can't stop sharting in walmart by c6gunner · · Score: 1

      Right? China is even better. A fiber connection in every rural hut. They'll get the clean water thing figured out afterwards; gotta have priorities.

  13. Do they need an address for this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Will they generously extend this benefit to those who only have a P.O. box as well?

  14. Yes and no. Farming is high tech. Self-driving by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Farming was an early adopter of a lot of tech, such as GPS and yes, several internet-enabled technologies. If your view of farming is that it hasn't changed in 100 years, you'd be really surprised.

    The cockpit of a modern combine can resemble a fighter jet, incuding heads-up display in a few cases. Farming equipment has been self-driving for a decade, with two-inch precision so as to operate between rows without damaging the plants.

    Having said that, 2Mbps is fine. That's 200,000 characters per second. They say "a picture is worth a thousand words" amd that's true for bandwidth - photos use a lot more bandwidth than textual-type data, and video is thousands of times as much as data as pictures. Streaming multiple high-resolution videos takes a shitload of bandwidth, few other uses approach that bandwidth requirement.

  15. In truth, broadband sucks by raymorris · · Score: 1

    > Anything less than a gigabit per second simply isn't broadband, whatever the FCC says

    Technically, Ethernet and fiber are baseband. 128kbps ISDN is broadband. Back when ISDN was the thing, 128kbps and 256kbps broadband (multi-channel) isdn was faster than 56kbps modems, so people starting associating the word "broadband" with high-speed.

    Ethernet and fiber, baseband (single-channel) are of course better than broadband technologies.

  16. Microsoft Aims To Bring Internet To Tribal... by mandark1967 · · Score: 1

    Because invalidating the white man's Win 10 Pro licenses isn't enough

    --
    Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
  17. Not really about the Indians by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Most of the 300 or 400 Swinomish who live on the reservation live directly across a small channel from LaConner, which has all the typical internet options of any small town. A high school senior could set up a wireless point-to-point link across the channel and cover Swinomish Village with a small mesh wifi deployment as a science project. The Swinomish tribe also run a very lucrative casino (https://www.swinomishcasinoandlodge.com/), gas station, and liquor store on a tiny finger of the reservation that borders the local state highway, a little over a mile from the main village. Surprisingly, the Swinomish have no problem getting internet access for their businesses there and for guests of the casino. I feel like they could probably mange to fund pulling a mile or so of fiber to connect the village to the casino to get internet.

    There are some people who live in the heavily forested area between the village and the casino, but those people are mostly non-indians who leased land from the Swinomish under 100-year leases and built houses. This made most of them cash-poor, as no one will pay much for a house that sits on leased, rather than owned land, and also since the houses are on septic and well water since there is no municipality or county to provide services. These people generally act like life owes them because they managed to get themselves upside down in a mortgage on a shitty house on the reservation.
    I
      suspect this Microsoft project is more for the whites living on the reservation than the Swinomish. I also wouldn't be surprised if the situation is similar for the Lummi. Lummi island is entirely populated by... non-indians. The actual Lummi reservation is on the mainland, where all the Indians were sent when they were kicked off the island. The reservation is less than a mile from Bellingham International Airport. And a Costco. And a Fred Meyer (a proto Walmart for those not from the Northwest).

    Like the Swinomish, the Lummi have a casino (https://www.silverreefcasino.com/), which also sits within their small reservation. The main Lummi village is also the home of the NW Indian College. I'd be willing to bet if the college has internet, most of the village has internet access as well. I suspect this is more to provide internet to the rich white folks living on Lummi Island, not for the benefit of the tribal members.

  18. Finally...for us ! by rojash · · Score: 1

    Sick of all these companies going to 3rd worlds and enabling their wifi in rural lands while our people in the boondocks had nada.