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Microsoft Aims To Bring Internet To Rural Tribal Lands In Washington, Montana (greatfallstribune.com)
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."
How fun to be able to tell your friends that your internet is down because you are in between balloons.
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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
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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)).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.'"
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
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.
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.
Sick of all these companies going to 3rd worlds and enabling their wifi in rural lands while our people in the boondocks had nada.
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.