How bootcamps are helping to address the historic gap in internet access on US tribal lands

There’s an orange-walled home theater with plush lounge chairs atop a steep hill on Matthew Rantanen’s Southern California ranch. But on a recent afternoon, people weren’t flocking to the room to watch a movie or escape the blazing heat; they were shining a beam of light through more than 55,000 feet (17 kilometers) of fiber-optic cable coiled in the corner.

The demonstration took place during a hands-on broadband training for tribes near rural Aguanga, about 53 miles (85 kilometers) north of San Diego. Participants handled fibers made of glass strands as thin as human hair that transmit energy via pulses of light.

The session was part of an initiative Rantanen and his business partner Christopher Mitchell launched in 2021 to reduce historical connectivity gaps in Indian Country.

“Essentially it brings together like-minded individuals who are building broadband communications for their community,” said Rantanen, a Cree descendant who has worked at the intersection of broadband and policy for two decades.

Broadband expansion has gotten a big boost from the Biden administration, which has invested $65 billion to build internet infrastructure where it’s needed. The money is fueling an unprecedented effort to connect every home and business in the country to high-speed internet, a lofty goal that President Joe Biden has said he hopes to achieve this by 2030.

That effort recently suffered a setback when Congress let an Internet subsidy program expire despite supplications from the board and proponents about its positive impact.

But ultimately, broadband expansion on tribal lands will only succeed if people understand how to make it work in their communities. That’s where hands-on training sessions like this come in.

More than 1 in 5 homes on tribal lands will lack access to adequate broadband, compared with fewer than 1 in 10 on non-tribal lands in 2024, according to data from the Federal Communications Commission. But experts say the gap is likely wider.

Tribes struggle to connect to the web for a variety of reasons, ranging from living in remote locations to lack of investment by internet providers. The lack of service has hampered every aspect of 21st-century life, from access to health care and education to the ability to start a business and stay in touch with friends and family.

“Many tribal communities are probably decades behind many urban areas in terms of internet connectivity,” said EJ John, a Navajo Nation member and policy analyst at the American Indian Policy Institute. “The connectivity rates are very low.”

With at least $3 billion specifically earmarked for tribes, depending on how they fare in the battle for the biggest pot federal money for broadband expansionRantanen said he has seen a “surge” of interest in training and applying for grants.

The solution Rantanen and Mitchell came up with was the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp: a hands-on way to teach people about the technology through three-day sessions.

“We want people to actually see a fiber network in the ground that they can manipulate and troubleshoot using tools,” said Mitchell, who leads broadband efforts for a nonprofit called the Institute of Local Self-Reliance.

Most previous boot camps took place on tribal lands, but about a third of the sessions were held at Rantanen’s ranch, which the founders affectionately call a “broadband playground.”

During the group’s 14th boot camp in June, participants roamed the ranch on foot and in utility vehicles, trailing clouds of dust. In the home theater, they played with a device called an optical time-domain reflectometer, which uses light to identify breaks and imperfections in a string of fibers. Halfway up the hill, outside two large storage containers that form Rantanen’s workshop, participants pulled cables through protective hollow tubes known as conduits. Later in the day, at a white tent decorated with retro sci-fi posters, they learned how to use a cable tie to secure fibers to utility poles.

Kyle Day, an engineer, attended his third bootcamp to learn how to manage a fiber-to-the-home network for the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, which currently lacks high-speed internet and cell phone service.

“For me, it’s about learning how to maintain and repair the cable if there’s a broken fiber somewhere,” Day said.

Learning these skills saves the tribe money and time, as it can take up to four hours for outside contractors to arrive, Day said.

While first installing and repairing fiber optics, Erin Dayl marveled at how information is transmitted over fiber. Previously, she helped develop an internet company that provided high-speed internet access to pueblos in New Mexico, and now she works on broadband and renewable energy development with tribes across the country.

“Information is what we all depend on,” Dayl said.

Natural disasters are a major concern for the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in southeastern Idaho, with some areas lacking cell service, according to Amber Hastings, a member of the tribe.

“If you don’t have any internet connection at all, you can’t connect yourself to the emergency services,” Hastings said. “If there’s a bushfire, you can’t know about it unless you can physically see the smoke.”

Claudia Tarbell, of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, said connectivity also has cultural implications. Without the internet, Tarbell said, people would miss out on important pop culture moments, such as Lily Gladstone’s first indigenous actress to win a Golden Globe.

“It inspires our youth to do more, to really think outside of our normal roles and jobs,” said Tarbell, a tribal engagement manager for Calix, a broadband software company that has sponsored some of the boot camps.

Seventy-two tribes have been represented at boot camps and nearly 400 people have attended at least once, with several going on to become instructors.

Matthew Douglas started attending the bootcamps when he was helping his community, the Hoopa Valley Tribe, transition from wireless to wired. He’s been back a dozen times.

In addition to learning about applications and planning, Douglas’ team leveraged the connections they made at boot camps to win a $65 million prize, the second largest amount of money ever won through the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program.

A few months after winning the money in 2022, the Northern California tribe hosted their own boot camp.

“We felt the need to give back because of the success we were seeing from partnerships,” said Douglas, “and the knowledge gained from the boot camps.”

Rantanen and Mitchell hope that in the future they can create connections that people can trust.

“They didn’t know that other tribes were building so much and had so much experience,” Rantanen said. “The coolest byproduct of the boot camps is this network of people who then use each other as resources.”

This became clear during a barbecue dinner at the end of a long day at the ranch.

People talked and laughed and shared stories, building exactly the kind of camaraderie the founders wanted to create. Toward the end of the meal, a participant interrupted the conversation to announce that some in the group were going bowling later that evening in nearby Temecula.

She said that everyone was invited.

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Associated Press editor Arushi Gupta wrote from Los Angeles.