WiMax from Sacred Wind blanketing Navajo lands

In the vast tracts of land making up the Navajo reservation in northwestern New Mexico, there are thousands of homes that redefine the notion of underserved. They’re not just without broadband; they’re without dial tones. Some 6000 homes are off-grid, and local telecom provider Sacred Wind Communications has given up trying to connect them with copper phone lines. Instead it’s looking to WiMax.

Sacred Wind is building a fixed WiMax network using Fujitsu access gear over the 3.65 GHz unlicensed band to extend phone and broadband access to a community that the telecom industry seems to have forgotten. Of the 8500 households distributed among thousands of square miles, only 29% have phones, but after Sacred Wind’s $70-million project is complete, John Badal, Sacred Wind’s chief executive officer, hopes to have more than 90% of the population connected to voice and broadband through some combination of copper, fiber and wireless point-to-point and point-to-multipoint technologies.

The project is an awesome task, Badal said, considering there are areas of the reservations with as few as 100 homes within 600 square miles. He readily admits some homes just can’t be connected with terrestrial technologies, and even the furthest of accessible homes may have to wait until 2012 to receive their first dial tone. But Badal has spent much of his career in telecom trying to tackle the problem of connecting the Navajo nation, starting when he took over as president of Qwest New Mexico.

“My biggest challenge as state president was to get telephone service to Navajo customers in New Mexico,” Badal said. “They accounted for one tenth of Qwest’s customers in the state, but I was spending 10% of my time addressing the issue. In four years, though, we only managed to get phone service to 42 new customers, while thousands went without.”

The initial trial phase of the project--funded by a grant from the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service--brought voice and high-speed data to 70 previously unconnected homes. Put in perspective, in the space of a few months, Sacred Wind doubled Qwest’s efforts over four years. The Navajo reservation, Badal said, is an area where great progress can be measured in the smallest of increments.

THE PROBLEM OF RURAL BROADBAND

An estimated 16 million American homes don’t have access to a broadband connection, a fact that has become the catalyst for broadband stimulus in the Obama administration’s economic recovery program. Rural providers stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of the new initiative with roughly a third of the $7.2 billion in stimulus funds being designated for projects in which 75% of the beneficiaries live in rural areas.