Datacenter Gives Internet To 70 Percent of Navajo Nation 162
Nerval's Lobster writes "The Navajo Nation cut the ribbon August 13 on an $8 million data center that has been under debate and development since 2000, when then-President Bill Clinton expressed shock that a 13-year-old Navajo girl who just won a new laptop couldn't connect to the Internet. At the time that girl won the laptop in a school contest, the Navajo Nation--a 27,425 square-mile region that covers portions of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico--had barely any IT infrastructure. The incident helped drive debate among leaders of the Navajo Nation, many of whom said they believed adding telecommunications and computing facilities were secondary to other concerns for the chronically poverty stricken region. The 50,000-square-foot facility in Albuquerque, New Mexico includes 25,000-sq.-ft. of datacenter and an equal space for computer training and business incubation, according to Nova Corp., an IT services company owned by Navajo Nation and formed in 2004 to execute an IT plan to create the "Digital Navajo Nation" (PDF). The drive to get it built also helped push development of a $46 million broadband project designed to cover about half of Navajo territory with 550 miles of fiber, 32 new cell towers and upgrades to another 27. It will eventually connect more than 30,000 households and 1,000 businesses."
hmmm.. casino investment? (Score:0, Insightful)
How about they put that casino loophole [wikipedia.org] to good use and pay for their own goddamned infractructure.
And no, before anybody starts, they weren't 'always here' [wikipedia.org].
Re:also goal of 2009 stimulus program (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
The problem is that like every other program like this, is that there is no real penalty for NOT doing what you were granted money to do. So you have all kinds of fly-by-night companies appying for and receiving grants, but they don't do anything except do studies and pay themselves. Nothing ever gets built, because it's quicker to take the money and run.
Rural broadband will only happen when the federal government does it THEMSELVES. Trying to get the "free market" to do things like this is impossible.
Navajo Nation (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let's hope.. (Score:3, Insightful)
who's "we", in your statement exactly? The company building the datacenter and infrastructure is owned by the Navajo Nation.
Go swallow your Liberal Guilt for a while and join the rest of us in reality. We have cake.
Re:In unrelated news (Score:2, Insightful)
Stereotype much, asshole?
Being a stereotype does not inherently make something false.
Re:Rural internet at its best (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a direct impact on education. And try to get a decent job in today's world without knowing at least basic Internet use.
Re:Let's hope.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you expecting us to believe most conservatives are well versed in immunology? Half of them believe in creationism, so I'm not expecting much scientific literacy.
The who story is mythology, designed to provoke white guilt.
Bullshit. Google for "Lord Jeffrey Amherst". There are actual historic documents which detailed his intent to do it.
You're full of shit.
Re:Let's hope.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Are there no guilt-ridden conservatives?
No. They always believe they're right, facts be damned.
Re:Rural Sourcing (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats funny, I thought the Apaches and Commanches were offshoots of the Sioux
Uh, no. Apaches and Commanches are quite unrelated to the Sioux (and each other), much like, say Chinese, Turks, and Tai (even though all those folks live on the same continent too). Apache is a Na-Dene language, most of the other speakers of which live in Alaska and the NW of Canada. Commanche speak a Uto-Aztecan language [wikipedia.org], all of whose speakers originally hail from either the Wetern US or NW Mexico.
The Siouan languages and cultures [wikipedia.org], by contrast were found in the central USA, roughly in the Mississippi watershed (with a couple of prominent exceptions in what is now New England). And yes, they were quite different peoples. Siouxans lived on riverbanks and were basically a settled farming people before Europeans came with their diseases and horses, making Buffalo hunting a more profitable living.
The Apache and Commanche OTOH were hunters from way back (in the Apache's case, living a bit more off of raiding nearby settled communities as well). The introduction of horses basically turned them into the New World's equivalent of the Mongols and early Turks.
They may look similar to the melanin-deprived, but they are very, very different.
Re:Rural internet at its best (Score:5, Insightful)
"Thousands of years" ago, information was restricted by the practicality of reproducing it. That is, someone actually had to write out the scroll. Literacy wasn't common for most of the populace. Some 600 years ago, reproducing books became more practical, with the advent of movable type. It made more sense to have a more-educated populace. The Internet is another iteration on the ease of disseminating information. It makes finding information easier than books did before it. That being said, it's just another tool on the educational toolbelt.
Basically, you can't compare education millenia ago with education centuries ago. As the Internet leaves its infancy, you won't be able to compare learning and education a few decades from now to education a couple decades ago. The Internet allows so much higher ease of access to so much more information that a sensible comparison is difficult to make.