By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
The Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska, which represents 34,900 Tlingit and Haida Indians worldwide, announced Thursday it has been awarded nearly $50 million in federal funds to improve broadband connectivity for its members.
The awards were announced by the Biden administration as part of the $224 million in high speed internet grants for tribal lands. The grants were made through the National Communications and Information Administration under the U.S. Department of Commerce.
The Broadband Infrastructure Deployment project proposes to install fixed wireless and use existing low-earth orbiting satellite (Starlink and OneWeb) service where fiberoptic cable is not available “to provide connections for 14,032 unserved Native American households with qualifying broadband service of no less than 25/3Mbps for all with options up to100Mbps symmetrical speeds, where available.”
Although the grant is awarded to Tlingit & Haida, residents and communities across Southeast are included in the project and will benefit, tribal officials said. Sitka Tribe of Alaska is a key partner in the project, said Chris Cropley, network architect for Tlingit & Haida.
“We make no distinction between tribal and non-tribal citizens,” said Cropley, who is from Sitka, now lives in Anchorage, and has more than 20 years of experience building networks.
“If you’re unserved, you’re unserved. So everybody will get signed up the same way. Everybody will get the same service,” Cropley said.
The 25/3Mps in the grant description refers to 25 megabits per second for downloading and 3 megabits per second for uploading. Cropley said this might not be as fast as urban areas have, but is more than many remote communities have, more than any unserved person has, and adequate for most of what people want to do to meet needs for work, communication, healthcare, access to state government, education and entertainment.
“We’re really hyper-focused on getting people from zero to 25, and at 25 you can do vidoconferencing, stream high-definition videos and do everything you want to do,” he said. “If I didn’t feel the 25/3 was sufficient, then we would do more. ... This is going to be revolutionary and transformative for Southeast Alaska.”
In its announcement Thursday, Tlingit & Haida said Southeast is home to dozens of communities and 20 tribal governments. The tribes and communities are spread out over 35,138 square miles of land and are largely remote with limited road access. “This presents a unique set of challenges when it comes to broadband deployment and is largely why there are huge swaths of unserved territory,” the announcement said.
Commenting on the award, T&H Tribal Council President Richard Chalyee Éesh Peterson said:
“If you care about advancing our region’s economy, supporting community sustainability, and ensuring our children have the educational opportunities they deserve, we all need to stand behind closing the digital divide in Southeast Alaska. Access to high-speed broadband is a necessity to everyday life and we cannot accept the disparity in access and affordability anymore,”
In all, 18 grants were awarded across the country through the tribal broadband connectivity program.
In discussing the importance of access to internet, Cropley said he’s been “an evangelist” since the early days “before there was an internet.”
“You can ask my parents (Sonny and Jo Cropley of Sitka) how much they got stuck with the AOL dial-up long distance bills,” he said. “I’m having to tell people less and less why they need it. But the big three are, to do business, access to government – DMV, state, federal, the PFD – access to healthcare.”
The need for everyone to have internet access came into sharp focus during the pandemic, when many schools across the U.S. went to remote online education. In Sitka, some CARES Act funds went to improve access to internet service for households that didn’t have it, for times when remote education was needed.
The other Alaska organizations receiving the broadband grants were Kenaitze Indian Tribe, $7 million; Metlakatla Power and Light, $10.5 million; and NANA Regional Corporation, $68.5 million.
Commenting on the role of STA, Cropley said, “Sitka Tribe has been instrumental to our success. Our success is Sitka Tribe’s and Tlingit & Haida together. They joined our consortium, they cooperated with our 2.5 gigaherz project. I can’t state enough the importance that the Sitka Tribe of Alaska has played, and that of our tribal citizens throughout Southeast. The support we’ve gotten – this would not be happening without that.”
