Bandwidth: Kids Built Their Own Internet Infrastructure
A story in Motherboard about how First Mile youth in the built and now operate their own broadband infrastructure. The story points to many other examples of innovation taking place in Indigenous communities across Canada, as showcased on the www.firstmile.ca website.
Three years ago, the people living in the Ochiichagwe’Babigo’Ining Ojibway Nation in Ontario would crowd in each other’s homes and outside the band office to access what little internet the community had. There was dial-up, there was expensive cellular data, and there was some service from an internet provider in a neighboring town; when the network went down, it would sometimes take weeks for a technician to come and fix the issue.
The community’s kids—itching to get their gaming systems online and scroll through Facebook on their phones—weren’t having it. So Chad Henry, now 26, gathered a group of five other young people, some just teenagers, and formed a youth council with the mission of bringing high speed internet to their town. And they were going to do it themselves…