Unique Bandwidth Challenges for Tribal Colleges
Bringing connectivity to remote settings poses special challenges. At Diné College, geography influenced the effort.
“We have locations that are close to students, but not so close to infrastructure,” Thompson says. “For instance, the location that we have in Aneth, Utah, is connected via fiber. In our New Mexico location, we had to work with four different service providers to see who could efficiently get us 100 megabits.”
The college eventually chose a wireless company that could deliver a cellular system. “We have to help the providers to engineer the path to those locations, identifying what services are nearby or just understanding the hops that the provider needs to make in order to provide services,” Thompson says.
From the students’ perspective, the outcome justifies the effort. “What they see in the microcampus is a stable location where they can securely connect to classes and do whatever coursework they need to complete,” she says.
Now, students can drive one hour to a microcampus instead of two hours to a regular campus — a major improvement for parents and for students who work.
Advocates for tribal colleges say their work depends on solutions like these.
“Part of the mission of these institutions is restorative, to bring back to the community the practices that are inherently related to the different tribal identities,” says Crazy Bull at the American Indian College Fund.
Food sovereignty practices and Native arts, such as beadwork, are typically taught in person. It’s possible to teach such things remotely, she says, “but you need a robust infrastructure to support that.”