Spread across the Four Corners region of the Southwest, the Navajo Nation is home to 175,000 members of the Navajo Tribe. Tribal members are scattered across more than 27,000 square miles of land stretching from northeast Arizona to northwest New Mexico to southeast Utah.
At least 60 percent of homes don’t have landline telephone service even though wireless signals are often spotty or nonexistent. Very often, the 911 system isn’t able to track where people are calling from during an emergency and high speed internet access is almost entirely unavailable.
Data obtained from the National Broadband Map maintained by the National Telecommunications Information Agency (NTIA) in collaboration with the FCC, shows that less than four percent of the population living in Navajo Nation territory have access to even the most basic wireline broadband speeds of three megabits per second downstream.
A $32 million grant from NTIA’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) is going to the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) one of the largest utilities owned and operated by an American Indian tribe.
Working with their wireless partner Commnet, NTUA will offer wireless voice and data services to residential customers at speeds of up to three megabits per second. Customers can sign up for mobile access as well as a fixed-wireless service that can plug into their home computer. The utility is also connecting local schools, hospitals and other anchor institutions at speeds of up to ten gigabits per second.
Eventually, NTUA hopes to interconnect the wireless broadband network with smart grid meters to serve residential electricity customers so that a 911 system can be set up that will know automatically where there is an emergency.
Some of the BTOP funding went directly to the Ute Indian Tribe in Utah to improve distance learning, telehealth, and public safety in the region. Other funding went to the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho to expand sparse wireless coverage through partnerships with regional providers Inland Cellular and First Step Internet. BTOP funding will also help the Pyramid Lake Palute Tribe in Nevada have 44 new miles of fiber to connect to the Regional Health Service Center.
In addition, BTOP paid for much of the infrastructure as well as a leased fiber optic connection running 180 miles from the edge of the Navajo Nations in Farmington New Mexico to Albuquerque that now links the entire system to the internet.