Tribes need better broadband

Chances are if you live on an American Indian reservation, you experience poor internet service. It’s one disparity that was revealed to many Natives during this pandemic. Trying to connect to the web is spotty in many cases and nonexistent in others.

On Indian Country Today, Loris Taylor, President and CEO, Native Public Media talked about the need for better broadband on tribal lands.

Taylor states “What we found is that COVID-19 was really, and truly an information centric, pandemic. Everybody wanted information about hospital protocols, about where to get food, about lockdowns and about directives from governments. So, at the end of the day, broadband is not just about hardware or the infrastructure. It's about a lot of other things, software capacity and whether we have the people on the ground to deploy broadband or to use broadband. It is about policies. Essentially, it's about the internet as being a dominant and transformational engine of communications and commerce."