By Geoffrey Shamah
Jaynie Parrish’s mother lives near a post office on the Navajo reservation and has no trouble accessing the internet. Her father, who lives about two hours away, gets no service at all.
“When I go to my dad’s place out on the res [reservation], I get no service; you try calling these companies and it’s like calling a void,” said Parrish, Executive Director of the Navajo County Democrats.
The Navajo Nation is one of 22 federally recognized tribes in Arizona, and although the nation is larger than the state of West Virginia and has a population of around 400,000, about a third of its residents lack adequate internet access — defined by the Federal Communications Commission as speeds of 25 Megabits per second for downloads and 3 Megabits per second for uploads.
Arizona tribes have been lobbying for better access for years, but have been hindered by a slew of obstacles, including the cost of installing physical infrastructure on large, sparsely populated reservations—a problem akin to that faced by other rural areas. Other problems include a legislative history that sought to carve up the ownership of Native lands, as well as federal and independent studies that significantly overestimated broadband access on reservations.
According to the FCC, 67 percent of people living on tribal lands in the contiguous U.S. have access to broadband. However, experts at the American Indian Policy Institute at Arizona State University say the real number is far smaller.
AIPI’s own Tribal Technology Assessment surveyed Native students and found that 35percent use the internet through a personal smartphone, with close to half of those students relying solely on a phone for their internet subscriptions. Another 36 percent of the students still rely solely on dial-up internet access. Of the students surveyed, only 12 percent responded that their main access to the internet was via a cable company, (which in most cases is a fiber-optic connection.)
Average speeds for people relying on dial-up, and even mobile devices, would not be classified as “high-speed” internet. “Fiber is the gold standard,” said E.J. John, a policy analyst at AIPI who is himself a member of the Navajo tribe, noting that fiber enables speedy movie downloads, gaming and streaming.
But when the pandemic hit, most tribal communities only had DSL, which “doesn’t have the kind of capacity to do remote learning,” adds John. He notes that it’s hard to use apps like Zoom on a typical DSL connection, which only runs at around 1-to-7 megabits per second— a fraction of what is necessary for video streaming.
During the pandemic, subpar internet access hindered students accessing online classes, professionals trying to work remotely, as well as political advocates, like Parrish, who has been trying to activate voters in Navajo County.
According to AIPI, one reason that the FCC overestimated broadband access on tribal lands was because it relied on census data surveys. If one house in a census block reported having internet access, the FCC considered the entire block served.
“Here in Arizona, you see rough terrain, you see the mountains, the valleys, what I have here is not going to be true two miles down the road,” explains John. ”That’s why this idea of looking at census blocks is just not the best way to gather this kind of data.”
Today, getting service to many tribal areas, or even updating existing groundwork, is hindered not only by the cost of running cable through rough terrain, but by aggressive treaties that date back to the 1800s when Native territories were carved up into a checkerboard of allotments under myriad of owners. The Dawes Act of 1887, in particular, split ownership of Native territory into public, private and tribal entities.
The effects are still felt to this day as building or upgrading a phone line, fiber optic cable or cell tower requires negotiations among these various entities at every step along the way.
As a result, many for-profit telecommunication companies have abandoned some tribal regions altogether, putting the burden on tribes themselves to get service to their members.
For example, after years of limited investment in rural areas, Frontier filed for bankruptcy in 2020 leaving many tribal residents without service.
“Frontier elected not to invest money in the area because they are a for profit company and it’s very difficult to run a profitable business in rural areas in the telecom space,” said John Champagne, project planner for the Navajo Tribal Utility Association. “So what you see is a lot of tribes have taken over the utilities from for-profit companies and are trying to run them themselves to improve the services.”
NTUA, which has been providing essential utilities like gas and electricity to the Navajo tribe since the 1950s, decided to enter the telecom business in 2012, when it created NTUA Wireless.
The tribe’s leap into telecom was made possible, at the time, by a $42 million federal aid grant, under the Obama administration.
Obama’s American Rescue and Reinvestment Act of 2009 invested around $8 billion into broadband nationwide. Tribal governments used federal subsidies and grants to establish some broadband infrastructure where for-profit companies have failed in the past.
Since its inception, NTUAW has gotten fiber connections to schools, hospitals and libraries, and has also built a wireless network.
Champagne explains that the network the company built in 2012, with the help of government grants and a public-private partnership with ComNet Communication Networks, only covered about 40 percent of the Navajo reservation, but has been growing every year.
Now, the Biden administration’s American Recovery Plan Act of 2021 has promised over $350 billion in federal grants and funds in an attempt to further expand broadband infrastructure nationwide.
Additionally, the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program has been assisting low-income households across the country to pay for internet services.
However, NTUAW has yet to lay any fiber directly to homes. A pilot project in Window Rock, using ARPA funding, that will connect about 30 of the more-populous communities on the reservation to fiber, within the next 18 months, is expected to test adoption rates and gauge how much it will cost the company to build out a more expansive fiber system.
“There’s a tremendous amount of development and growth on the telecom side right now; there’s never been more development in terms of telecom on the Navajo nation, ever, than in the last two years,” said Champagne.
While the increase in funding has improved broadband access on Navajo land, there are still areas on the Nation that lack essential utilities like running water and stable electricity. Experts like EJ John believe that it will still take years and billions of dollars more to close the digital divide in Indian country.
“In the last couple pieces of legislation, there was $2 billion made specifically available for tribes,” said John. “According to our own tribal technology assessment, the need is probably closer to $10 billion. So $2 billion is a good start. But it needs to be more, there needs to be more investment, and just more resources for tribes.”