TEMPE, Ariz. – Native American tribes are spread across the state of Arizona, and Mark Goldstein, president of the International Research Center in Tempe, Ariz., consults with some of the independent nations to make their lives more accessible with technology.
The Hopi Nation’s borders rest in northeast Arizona with a rather small population of around 8,000 living in the reservation and 2,000 off, surrounded on all sides by the much larger Navajo Nation of approximately 250,000 residents, with much larger borders that span across four states.
The Hopis live in rough terrain, often amongst somewhat ancient dwellings. It’s believed that the city of Old Oraibi, one of nine population centers, has been continually occupied since 1050 A.D.
One hurdle to modernizing the area is that village elders prohibit disturbing the ground to put in infrastructure. This includes water, sewage, telephone and utilities leaving two to three villages that still do not have access to running water and electricity.
“Every home, every family compound is entitled to have a satellite dish and cellular phones and generators and water tanks in pickup trucks but there’s no distributed utilities through there,” said Goldstein. “So there is no telephone service over wireline in that community – there is some from cellular of course, but it’s not data-capable.”
the Hopi Tribe’s project is the construction of two 180-foot towers at the villages of Hotevilla and Spider Mound to get signals between some of the more remote locations in the Hopi Nation’s nine population centers for a comprehensive Wi-Fi mesh. The final plan is for 65 nodes with 80211n both A and BG channel. The AN will largely be used for backhaul and meshing and the BGN for delivery to businesses, government agencies and consumers.
A network operations center is also being built for Hopi Telecom Inc., a company that the Hopi tribe owns outright. The Hopis exerted the rights of a sovereign nation and federal loans to create their own telecom, and have since deployed fiber and DSL services where it’s available to do so on the reservation.
However, the mobility is a modern wonder, and members of the Hopi Nation have to find a balance between respecting their culture and laws with the desire to go wireless. Of course, mobility allows for trips to the local store, restaurant, post office and rural homes, all with the ubiquitous ability to connect devices for broadband services.
To get things moving, the U.S. Department of Commerce under the Economic Development Authority provided a $2.3 million grant to “connect” the Hopis. An open request for proposal (RFP) was given and out of eight companies that applied, Kitchell Construction, a Phoenix-based company, won the contract.
“None of the technology is at all startling or unusual, but what is perhaps the most interesting is getting the rights to deploy,” said Goldstein. “It’s a mesh Wi-Fi deployment with some microwave backhaul and towers, but in terms of negotiating and securing of rights, it’s been extremely challenging.”
Goldstein said he is entering year eight of what was slated to be a five-year project.
He was brought in after year two, and has made visits to several entities to confront the confusing issue of property rights in the Hopi Nation.
The Hopis structure land ownership to where any particular piece of land may be owned by an individual, that person’s whole family, or by an entire clan, village, or tribe. There are also public rights-of-way, which are partially owned by the Arizona Department of Transportation and the power companies that own utility poles. The mish-mash of resources provides a challenge to build coverage.
“You expect things to take twice as long (in the Hopi Nation build) as they would within a commercial non-native area, and they end up taking about twice as long as that,” said Goldstein.
When not confronted with property rights, certain areas are considered sacred and must be shown proper respect.
The towers are nearly complete and designed for collocation with Hopi Telecom as the anchor. The tribe is in talks with carriers to add to the network. Goldstein said the RFP and vendor qualification for the mesh network is also coming to a close, and the network operations center is slated for a completion within the next year.
