Again, no rest for the hungry and spectrally obsessed — we're getting (really interesting) talks through dinner: WiFi and Indian Tribes; Community Networks; and a political overview.
The reps from Brown Eyed Communications, an org that provides WiFi on Indian reservations, are Canadian. David Joyce is the COO and Gary Anaquod is CTO.
(Ed: On several occasions today, we've heard that the big problem with a commons approach to spectrum allocation is that we don't have any experimental data on the success of the commons; commons advocates reply that the regulatory framework makes it impossible to try an experiment — but Indian land is sovereign and potentially not subject to radio regulation from the CRTC or the FCC).
David: We don't call ourselves "Indians" — we say "First Nations." That will be important later. Nine days ago, we were installing a 20 mi. shot wireless link from a small town in rural Saskatachewan. We installed it for Health Canada, which will bring telemedecine services into a remote community.
That's the goal: to spread WiFi to rural communities in Canada and get to the unserved/underserved regions. It's out last (twenty) mile answer.
There's more value here than economic value — there's social value, too. We're a for-profit org, we want to make money, but we want to do it through accomplishing social value (something that wasn't mentioned much here today).
There are 72 First Nations communities in SK, and 600 in Canada — it's a big job to get links to all those communities. Many of these communities live in third-world conditions.
I walk around the streets in Silicon Valley and I see prosperity all around me — I want to see that back home.
We understand that there is a technology that can address some of these issues. We believe that broadband is a potential equalizer. Introducing a phone to a rural town can double the income of each farmer by making them an active participant in the local economy. Many settlements in rural SK didn't have basic phone service until three years ago. Unemployment on the rez is at 80 percent.
Good communications can change life on the rez. Forget basic phone-service, we want VoIP. The monopolistic telco is a formidable opponent. We consider ourselves young Jedi.
The telco needs to contend with more than our little company — they have to contend with their own inertia. The bust has affected them considerably. There's a lot of dead weight in that company, highly paid people who shouldn't be.
We visited the CTO of the Provincial telco and it was quite a shock to us, for in front of the VP of Marketing, the CTO said, "WiFi — we've met with them." This is the kind of technologist who rises to the top of a Crown Corporation.
We offered to build the last mile and share ownership, but they weren't interested. They want to muscle us out — they're like a dinosaur, a T-Rex. Unlike them, we have not inherited the cost of supporting a crumbling legacy communications system.
Now onto the question of spectrum, sovereignty and jurisdiction: wireless comms is not new to First Nations — you've heard of smoke-signals? It wasn't the smoke, it was EM radiation — free-space optics — firelight. The bandwidth requirements weren't quite as high then.
And just like a WiFi AP, they needed to be up high and line-of-sight.
Jurisdiction isn't a new issue either — we've been negotiating rights (fishing, hunting, minerals, etc) forever, and scrapping with the Feds over resources is bred into us.
When the first gaming casino was established on a reserve, a SWAT team took the chief away in chains. A decade later, gaming is an accepted way of bringing prosperity to the reservation. That's how you get things done in Indian Country.
The New Zealand Maori won 25 percent of the spectrum away from the 3G licensors, within the Commonwealth.
We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation.
It's about capacity building, R&D, self-determination, access and choice. We've made accomplishments in this area, and we will make a difference.
The Constitutional status of First Nations communities in Canada means that we'll have some time in the ring. We're reaching out to other indigenous people around the world — we want to see this replicated abroad.
We're setting up a radio haven. A regulatory free-zone. On the reservation.
With these technologies deployed successfully, other communities will look like cave-dwellers by comparison. That's kind of ironic.
Gary: We already own our homes and mineral rights and so forth in commons. We have traditional mechanisms for resolving issues of scarcity in the commons.
