CIVIC-PG Track B: Enhancing Digital Inclusion in Rural Tribal Communities with Dynamically Reliable Mobile Broadband

This project focuses on improving access to Internet and digital services among rural tribal communities, which are historically some of the communities most underserved by Internet in the United States. Effectively using digital services to access critical health, educational, and other social services requires both access to affordable, reliable broadband infrastructure as well as the training and support to take advantage of that infrastructure. Recognizing the high cost and complexity of extending traditional, always available, Internet infrastructure to the hardest-to-reach, in this project we propose an alternative: dynamically reliable Internet access, a supplemental form of network infrastructure that provides predictable, reliable, but periodic Internet service to otherwise unserved locations at a fraction of the cost of traditional permanent Internet infrastructure. We couple this with outreach efforts to provide digital skills training on location to people served by this supplemental network service, thus ensuring newly-served populations can make effective use of this infrastructure. In this pilot project, we partner with the Nez Perce Tribe and Nez Perce Network Systems, a Tribal utility providing Internet service, to design a dynamically reliable cellular network and to extend their existing digital skills training and support program to provide on-site support with tribal elders where they reside. We will leverage the Nez Perce Tribe’s existing fixed network infrastructure to support this network, along with the Tribe’s extensive 2.5GHz radio frequency spectrum holdings. In doing so, we will explore what dimensions of reliability are relevant in the context of digital inclusion and expand the binary notion of "reliability" operationalized in contexts such as federal digital equity policy to a design space to allow network operators to match technical affordances of low-cost network infrastructure with user needs within their community. This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program’s Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.