A couple of weeks ago, the Wi-Fi in Shawn Nez’s Arizona home kept flickering on and off.
“It was always happening between the afternoon and the evening,” Nez said. “We would have a bunch of internet problems or we wouldn’t have connection or we would have really slow speed. That was for about a week or two.”
Nez is in Pima County, home to the capitol of the Tohono O’odham Nation. He graduated from the local tribal college, Tohono O’odham Community College, in 2016, before transferring to Navajo Technical University to study Information Technology.
Thankfully, it’s summer. Nez said, otherwise the internet troubles can be an issue for students, “especially if we have an assignment coming that’s due the next day and we gotta work on it. No doubt, it’s definitely a factor for students out here.”
The halting Wi-Fi Nez described isn’t uncommon in tribal lands – and it’s a long-standing problem for tribal colleges and universities.
Last year, the Federal Communications Commission found that about 35 percent of Americans living on tribal lands don’t have broadband service compared to 8 percent of Americans overall, prompting a Government Accountability Office report on tribal access to Spectrum.
