Assessing your Needs

When planning your broadband networks you need to assess your needs. A very broad overview of things you will want to consider are:

Transport:
The bandwidth feed to deliver broadband on and off the reservation. What is available or will be used to deliver broadband to your community? Examples are:
Wired: Fiber, Coax, Copper
Wireless: Microwave, Satellite

Distribution:
Once broadband is delivered to the reservation, how will bandwidth be distributed around the reservation?
Wi-fi, DSL, cable, etc

Access:
How will your customers attach to the network?
Modem, antennae, set top box, etc

Content:
The reason for building the network. While it is not necessary to develop your own content to build a broadband network, it is important to realize that without culturally and locally relevant content the system may not be anything more than a bunch of meaningless equipment and wires in the eyes of your customers.

When developing systems to spur economic development, it's also important to realize that true economic development can't happen if we only focus on capitalizing infrastructure and equipment while ignoring our human spirit.

Technology has been proven to be a great tool for stimulating the most creative of minds. With applications such as Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Blogger.com, and countless other sites the lines of what we define as community are blurring. We are no longer confined to geographic locations. We are no longer satisfied in being passive recipients of news and information. Rather, more of us are taking active roles and participating in developing our own content.

For many, broadband has provided a means of claiming our own humble place at the corporate table of technology to share news, information, and transfer our knowledge to others in the global community. For my own tribe, it has become a way of using technology's greatest strengths to preserve our greatest truths in our history, language, and culture.