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.
]]>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.
]]>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.
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