Basic Broadband for "Homes" on Tribal Lands

Sacred Wind Communications was founded on the premise of “serving the unserved,” given the technological void that envelopes so many tribal communities in New Mexico. While the company continues to expand its broadband deployment initiatives among tribal communities in New Mexico, it still faces an uphill battle when trying to balance high infrastructure buildout costs with high consumer demand, particularly in remote Navajo communities. The following points specifically elucidate how difficult it is for a small, rural telco whose mission is to serve tribal communities that want and need broadband services, but still do not have basic access:

1. Operating costs and infrastructure deployment costs are much higher on remote tribal lands than those in other rural and urban areas.
2. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), using U.S. Census Bureau data and its own Form 477 data, designating a carrier’s served households, misses many unserved tribal homes in its calculation of broadband support needed by the carrier.
3. A major part of the undercounting of tribal homes is the failure to recognize certain structures as domiciles, inhabitable by Western standards.

[John Badal is a co-founder of Sacred Wind Communications and is the CEO and Chairman of the Board.]