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