Notes from the Field: Wardriving and Warflying: Collecting Accurate Spectrum and Coverage Data in Indian Country

Recently, our team has been working with the IT directors and network administrators for four sovereign Native nations and one rural county in northern New Mexico to try to extend middle-mile infrastructure across and through political jurisdictions.

One challenge that our team has encountered pertains to the difficulty in locating and acquiring adequate spectrum licensing for TV white space base stations to serve locations in scenarios where fiber-to-the-home is not an immediate possibility.

Our team has had to work through numerous challenges to accomplish what we initially thought would be a relatively procedural task.

Contemplating the challenges helps us to discern the broader social, political, and technological implications for national misrepresentation of coverage and connectivity data, particularly in light of the social distancing requirements for preventing COVID-19 outbreaks.

A blog piece on our work was published to the Network Sovereignty Blog of the The Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab