In Indian Country, the proportion of households with high-speed internet access has consistently lagged behind the rest of the U.S. There has been some work to improve things, with an influx of federal funding helping some tribes build their own broadband networks.

You look up here, you have Jette, Boulder, Pistol Creek, Oliver,” said Chuck Reese, infrastructure administrator for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He’s inside a small server room with fans blazing, pointing to labels on the back of a server. They name the locations of four cellular towers on the mostly rural Flathead Indian Reservation in northwest Montana. “This is the actual fiber that goes to each tower,” he said.

Those towers blanket roughly 1,300 square miles with high-speed internet. The computer network pandemic has made it difficult for tribal employees to work from home because many don’t have reliable and affordable internet service. But now, “we can put an IP phone on our network right at your house and it would be just like having an office right at your home,” Reese said.

The network will also allow tribal police to issue tickets electronically from their vehicles and the tribal health department to do paperwork in the field. This is one of the first tribally controlled wireless networks to come out of a Federal Communications Commission program that gave tribes across the U.S. wireless-spectrum licenses for free. But tribes still have to build and pay for the infrastructure to broadcast high-speed broadband.

“There are going to be 200 to 300 projects that are going to be built in Indian Country,” said former FCC official Geoff Blackwell. He’s with Amerind Risk Management, a Native-owned insurance company that also helps tribes build broadband infrastructure.

read more: wireless network engineer