Microsoft Aims To Bring Internet To Rural Tribal Lands In Washington, Montana (greatfallstribune.com) 53
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."
No, Its my connection not yours... (Score:2)
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
Re:Broadband is "critical" for farmers? (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: americans can't stop sharting in walmart (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
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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 [wikipedia.org].
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 ar
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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 empt
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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.org] 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 les
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yes and no. Farming is high tech. Self-driving (Score:3)
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
Re: That's great (Score:2)
Really? Is that the best troll you can manage? I saw better trolls on alt.flame -- after people stopped using it.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
In truth, it isn't broadband (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
In truth, broadband sucks (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: In truth, it isn't broadband (Score:2)
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?
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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 extermin
Re: In truth, it isn't broadband (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
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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
Re: In truth, it isn't broadband (Score:2)
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 fa
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: In truth, it isn't broadband (Score:2)
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 broadb
Re: (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.
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 minu
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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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Very clever (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.
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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.
Microsoft Aims To Bring Internet To Tribal... (Score:2)
Because invalidating the white man's Win 10 Pro licenses isn't enough
Finally...for us ! (Score:1)