ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.
Navajo officials have a vision that one day students on the vast reservation can do school work on laptops during bus rides home and that making a phone call won’t mean walking miles to the nearest chapter house.
The vision starts on the eastern edge of the reservation in New Mexico through initiatives known as the Internet to the Hogan and Dine Grid.
The Navajo Technical College in Crownpoint is working with staff at the University of California-San Diego’s supercomputer center to develop a wireless grid on the reservation.
The first phase calls for building a network that could hook into the national LambdaRail –an ultrahigh-speed network used by the University of New Mexico and other schools — and take advantage of another next-generation network known as Internet 2.
An extended system of broadband towers would then allow schools, medical clinics, hospitals and homes within a 15- to 30-mile radius of Navajo chapter houses to be connected.
“There’s all kinds of applications,” said Tom Davis, dean of instruction at Navajo Technical College.
