Sacred Wind Communications in northwestern New Mexico is building a fixed WiMAX network using Fujitsu equipment in the 3.65 GHz band to extend phone and broadband access to some 8,500 households--most of which are on a Navajo reservation--that are spread out across thousands of square miles. Sacred Wind is spending $70-million on the project. Only about 29 percent of the households it plans to cover have basic dial tone service.
Sacred Wind aims to have more than 90 percent of the population connected to voice and broadband through some combination of copper, fiber and wireless point-to-point and point-to-multipoint technologies. The first phase of the project was funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service; it delivered voice and high-speed data to 70 previously unconnected homes.
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