This Is Outrageous
The Associated Press is reporting that the Navajo Nation likely to lose Internet service
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (AP) — The thousands of Navajo Nation residents who rely on the Internet to work, study and communicate across their 27,000-square-mile reservation will be out of luck Monday, if their service provider shuts access as planned.
“It’s going to be a sad day,” said Ernest Franklin, director of the tribe’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission.
A tribal audit last year revealed that Utah-based provider OnSat Network Communications Inc. may have double-billed the tribe, and it raised questions about how the tribe requested bids for the Internet contract.
Those discoveries led the Universal Service Administration Co., which administers the service under the Federal Communications Commission’s E-rate program, to tell the tribe March 28 that it would withhold $2.1 million from OnSat.
Jim Fitting, an attorney for OnSat, said the delay in payment means it can’t pay subcontractor SES Americom for satellite time.
“With USAC taking this particular position, it doesn’t look like we’re going to get paid in the foreseeable future,” Fitting said. “We’re already $4 million in the hole, so why should we continue doing it?”
Most evenings, when residents get off work, the reservation’s chapter houses are closed, but their wireless signals remain live. So it’s common to see residents with laptops sitting outside the chapter houses in cars, working away, a local official said.
First off, you and I pay for this service by a tax on communications, it doesn’t come from general revenues, and we paid for it by having to deal with Microsoft, which provided the money that was used to create the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that provided an lot of the equipment. As far as I’m concerned providing communications is vital for people to thrive in the modern world, so this is an excellent use of money.
The second thing is why are they going to these lengths over a $2 million dollar expense, that is temporary until a cellular system can be constructed, when they ignore the antics of KBR and others in Iraq that have cost us billions? Why is it that the only people who get audited are poor people hit by hurricanes, and Native Americans? How about corporations that are making people and pets sick? How about people who are war profiteers? How about people who provide poisonous trailers?
If there’s a possibility of double billing, you escrow the amount in dispute and determine the facts. This is an expensive, absurd way of conducting business.
Maybe the Dineh should see what kind of deal the Mexican government can offer them?
6 comments
The Navajo Nation will not be saddened with the disappearance of David Stephens and OnSat from the reservation. We have Frontier Communications just down the road who can provide Internet connectivity to the Navajo Nation at less than a fraction of the monthly cost being billed to the Navajo Nation. The only tribal officials saddened by the departure of David Stephens are those responsible for the letting of contracts with no negotiable terms for the Navajo’s allowing the overbilling by OnSat.
Paco, I’m making no claim about the propriety of the existing contract. I assume the Navajo Nation is like any political government and subject to “lapses of integrity” by officials. My complaint is that the users have been cut off while this plays out. There’s no need to punish the users for something they had no part off, and this isn’t the normal procedure in contract disputes. You have to wonder why the Navajo Nation dispute isn’t being handled in the same way as similar problems with the Internet contracts for school systems in many states.
As for this particular contract, I think it’s definitely flawed, because anyone can go to a number of satellite Internet providers and get the equipment for about $300 and pay about $100/month for 1.5 megabit download service. In a group setting, both should be reduced. Another $100 for an efficient, high quality wireless router at each satellite system location, and you have the current system.
Oh, about Frontier Communications – I dealt with them when they were Rochester Telephone in Rochester, New York, before they did all of their expanding. It wasn’t a wonderful experience. There is also the problem that they are a wired network and would have to run cable/fiber to some pretty inaccessible locations, so I don’t think they would be a good fit. It would take a very long time and require a lot of construction and disruption to install a wired network, where satellite and cell towers could be deployed much faster with less disruption.
Uhm, Bryan, there’s these things called “microwaves”. You give me a nice tall tower with line-of-sight to the chapter houses, and I can beam 5mb/sec to them no problem without the latency delays of satellite communications. Might require some dishes on poles at the chapter houses, that’s about it. We investigated doing this for our school district in a rural area of Louisiana, but Southern Bell came through with T1 lines for really cheap, so we aborted it. We had already worked out, however, that we could put our main microwave relay on top of a water tower near the center of the area and get line of sight to all our schools (with a couple of 30 foot masts at the more problematic ones, but so it goes). See, e.g., Motorola’s Canopy gear.
That said, the Navajo reservation presents some, err, “unique”, issues here. We could plan our wireless Internet access because our furthest school was 25 miles from the central water tower (yep, big school district, 45 miles between the southern-most school and northern-most school, but only five schools — tells ya how few people lived in this area!). The Navajo nation covers an area roughly five times larger than our school district, and the terrain is pretty darned rugged. Still, this is how cellular service would be provided in that area if it were ever provided, so we’re not talking about something unprecedented or unusual…
Satellite, frankly, sucks. I have used satellite Internet before when in remote areas similar to the Navajo Nation where there’s no wired providers, and it’s a dismal experience due to the latency issues. For the place in question there was no choice — they were in a valley, there was only two other people living in that valley, and there was no line-of-sight to anywhere outside that valley. But “wiring” up an entire reservation is a different story altogether… it’s feasible, at that point, to set up microwave relays and such to get your data shuffled around where it’s not feasible to run wires. Satellite is just a stopgap in that case, a stopgap which appears to have backfired on the Navajo here.
We use a lot of microwave equipment locally because we are surrounded by Eglin Air Force Base and they don’t permit anything except underground wire through a few limited corridors which are already crowded by the large utilities and the base’s own needs. My local university is tied to another campus in Alabama via microwave for cost and regulatory reasons. [the FCC is a lot easier to deal with that the Florida Public Utilities Commission, the interstate rates are a lot cheaper].
If you look at the 26,000 square miles of the Navajo Nation there are obvious corridors where fiber can and should be run with microwave expanding from hubs, but if you are trying to get Internet access to people at a couple of hundred locations, satellite makes sense while you are building out the permanent solution. The latency problems and relative low upload speeds make VOIP, gaming, VPN, and other features unusable, but that doesn’t affect the ability to get information or to work at human speeds. I started on this mess with a 110 baud modem that cradled a telephone handset, so I have a different perspective that other people. In those days a 9600 bps serial CRT terminal plugged directly into a minicomputer was living large.
In addition to everything else in this problem there are some obvious tower locations that are out-of-bounds for religious reasons. Siting is going to be a problem in logistics, topography, technology, and theology. It will have to be a hybrid, but it needs a lot of upfront planning and design work, years of it, so they needed a quick and dirty solution – satellite.
It looks like the solution was dirtier than it needed to be, which a political problem, not technological.
[…] outrage is the with the methods used by the Federal government in my post, This Is Outrageous. These types of problems have occurred in other areas, but the systems weren’t shut down. […]