10
CityAndStateNY.com
August 2, 2021
We’ll build it ourse
A
MONG THE MANY indelible images of life during the coronavirus pandemic, one was kids and teachers camped in school parking lots to attend remote classes, relying on the internet connection provided by schools and other places like libraries, school buses and even Taco Bell. Members of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation in Western New York were among those traveling to the parking lot of Akron Central Schools, which serves both the reservation and other surrounding communities, in the early days of remote learning last year. “It wasn’t 100%, far from it. But it worked,” Antoinette Abrams, who works as a Native American liaison at the school, said of the internet connection accessed from the school parking lot. Remote learning eventually got easier once the district provided Wi-Fi hot spots for students to use at home. While an improvement, the connection provided by those hot spots “wasn’t 100%” either, Abrams said. The need for cumbersome workarounds and imperfect connections provided by Wi-Fi hot spots comes from the lack of broadband connection in many rural areas in New York, including parts of the Indigenous territories. Reports by the Federal Communications Commission state that deployment of advanced telecommunications on tribal lands is behind deployment in nontribal areas. As of 2018, 27.7% of residents on tribal lands lacked access to fixed broadband at speeds of 25/3 Mbps – the FCC’s minimum benchmark speed – compared to 22.3% of residents in other rural areas and 1.5% of residents in urban areas. A report by the internet research group BroadbandNow suggests that among those who do have access to wired broadband on Indigenous lands, few have access to a plan below $60 per month. The barriers to accessing a high-speed fixed internet connection in Indigenous communities are similar to those faced by other rural areas across the country: a lack of internet providers willing to build the infrastructure to provide that connection. The investment to lay fiber in remote, less populated areas is often not seen as worth it by internet providers. “(T)he remote, isolated nature of these areas combined with challenging terrain and lower incomes increase the cost of network deployment and entry, thereby reducing the profitability of providing service,” the FCC’s 2020 Broadband Deployment Report states of tribal areas. As it did for many other rural and remote
parts of New York, the pandemic highlighted the lack of internet connections in some Indigenous communities. While both the state and federal government have undertaken coverage mandates and grant programs aimed at making broadband both more accessible and more affordable – including encouraging large internet service providers to build in remote areas – some tribes have taken matters into their own hands. The St. Regis Mohawk Tribe, whose land is adjacent to the U.S.-Canadian border in Franklin County, is one of several dozen tribes across the nation that own and run a broadband network. Mohawk Networks was launched with the help of a $15 million investment – some of that coming from federal grant money – to lay 68 miles of fiber in the area in 2015, and the company now functions as a tribally owned LLC, serving customers both inside and outside the territory. “We were one of those completely unserved communities,” said Allyson Mitchell, gen-
eral manager of Mohawk Networks. When the broadband project first started, Mitchell was working with the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribal Council. “Our leadership felt that it was imperative for us to be pushing a way to be able to connect our community, and to be able to have high-speed internet access for our community members – for education, for health care, for public safety,” Mitchell said. The network now serves about 1,600 homes as well as businesses within the community. According to the network’s website, the cost of an internet-only plan on the tribe’s land starts at around $60 per month. Mitchell added that the company works with low-income households to qualify for any subsidies. Prior to the tribe’s broadband investment, the community had been relying on dial-up and cellphones. “If it were not for our broadband infrastructure and our connected community as it is right now, I don’t know how that would have shaped our response to the pandemic,” Mitchell said.
