"Long before anyone talked of federal stimulus money for rural broadband deployments, there was Sacred Wind Communications--a small incumbent local exchange carrier in New Mexico that has found and continues to look for innovative ways to connect the thousands of remote homes in the state's Navajo reservation with both basic telephone service and high-speed Internet access.

John Badal, Sacred Wind's chief executive officer, served as president of Qwest New Mexico in the early 2000s. His biggest challenge was trying to bring basic telephone service to the Navajo Nation, the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States and whose area encompasses 27,000 square miles in Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. Laying copper cable throughout the rugged desert area to connect a relatively small number of people who couldn't afford to pay much for service wasn't economically feasible.

In four years, Qwest only managed to bring phone service to 42 new customers--out of thousands. "It took us two years to get through the rights of way process. Six of those homes had moved by the time the process was completed. It would have taken 45 years to reach 70 percent of the homes in our territory," Badal said. "We needed a different technology altogether. We needed to go wireless.""

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Sacred Wind: Bringing WiMAX to the Navajo reservation (FierceBroadbandWireless 5/25)