Wireless VoIP Gives Voice to Indian Nation.

What began as one Indian reservation's desire for better telephone service now stands to become a national movement to bring broadband technology to other reservations around the U.S.

Mescalero Apache Telecom (MATI) took life in March 2001 and in four short years has upgraded telephone service to the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation, introduced high-speed Internet access and begun trialing broadband wireless technology for voice and data as a competitive carrier.

As important, however, is that MATI is sharing its knowledge with others in the same situation.

“We made Mescalero a showcase to show other tribes,” said Godfrey Enjady, general manager of Mescalero Apache Telecom. “We have a ‘telecom 101’ training course for tribes and show them the back-office, the billing and the front-office systems, as well as a lot of training that we cram into a week. We have NECA [National Exchange Carriers' Association] and vendors come out and make presentations. It's all part of our outreach to tribes to show them how telephone companies work.”

Enjady is passionate about that outreach because of the poor status of telecommunications networks on reservations nationwide. Of the 575 recognized tribes in the U.S., only seven have on-site telephone companies, he said.

“All of them have very poor phone services,” Enjady said, with telephone penetration standing at 55%, according to a 2003 FCC survey.

Like many tribal reservations spread out over huge swaths of land, the 720-square mile geography of the Mescalero Apache reservation is leading it to explore using broadband wireless technology to deliver high-speed data and voice over IP, he added.

“We have vast pieces of land with no infrastructure, and we can use unlicensed spectrum because there is hardly any interference, given the rural nature of the areas,” Enjady said.

MATI was originally a GTE property, but the Mescalero Apache tribe was not happy with the quality of the service.

“We wanted to stimulate economic development in the area, but we needed a premier telephone company to attract business,” Enjady recalled. “We wanted a broadband infrastructure, and they wanted us to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get broadband.”

Instead, the tribe convinced GTE to sell them the 950 lines that served the reservation, he said, and began the transition in 1999. (During the transition, Valor Telecommunications acquired most of GTE's New Mexico access lines). Enjady, who had 24 years in a variety of telecom jobs, including 15 years at GTE, said the first challenge was very basic — to find a voice switch. A GTE-owned switch in a nearby town had served the reservation, but it wasn't included in the sale.

“Siemens actually loaned us a temporary switch,” he said. “We then rebuilt the whole system. We ran more than 1000 route miles of fiber optic cable, and we deployed ADSL broadband to about 98% of our customers. We immediately went from 750 subscribers to 1700, all on the reservation.”

To date, MATI, which also operates as an ISP, has 390 ADSL broadband subscribers and many more dial-up users. The company began offering its broadband service in 2002.

The reservation is beginning to reap the rewards of its effort, through distance learning programs now available from colleges such as New Mexico State and Eastern New Mexico University and through service to a newly rebuilt casino, one of two on the reservation.

“We were able to meet [the casino's] needs with gigabit Ethernet and a voice-over-IP PBX,” Enjady said. The new casino, Inn of Mountain Gods Casino and Resort, will be opening soon.

In 2003, MATI hosted its first telecom conference and later that year was named Enterprise of the Year by the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development at the Reservation Economic Summit. Since then, MATI has attracted the attention of tribes all over the country.

“The farthest a person has come was from Seneca, N.Y., the Mohawk tribe,” Enjady said. “We've also had people come from the Seminole tribe in Florida, the Cherokee nation in North Carolina and from states like South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming.”

Many of those coming to MATI's conferences face similar challenges. Their phone systems are outdated and access to broadband is scarce or non-existent. The cost of rebuilding infrastructure across the distances of the reservation is daunting — which is what led Enjady and his pioneering phone company to explore broadband wireless as the primary means of doing basic telephony as well as high-speed Internet.

“Provided there's enough bandwidth there, using broadband wireless is really not that different from providing VoIP over any broadband network,” said Andy Randall, vice president of marketing at MetaSwitch, which supplied MATI's softswitch for its VoIP service. “The real decision is whether or not a company uses unlicensed or licensed spectrum.”

In rural areas, he said, unlicensed spectrum makes more sense because it is much cheaper, as well as faster to set up.

“There are a limited number of licenses, and the FCC charges quite a lot for them,” Randall said. “If you are operating in an area where there isn't much interference, it makes more sense to do unlicensed.”

The service provider can also choose between operating their own broadband network or partnering with an existing broadband wireless company, as MATI has done.

“They have put in their own softswitch and session border controller, and they are delivering services over that broadband network,” Randall said. “As with any VoIP service, you have quality-of-service issues to consider. If you don't own that network, you need to understand all the routers in between so you have prioritization set on voice traffic at each of them. Often, because you are extending your reach, you may be going over other company's networks in the middle, and that can be challenging.”

MATI decided to test VoIP over broadband wireless as a competitive carrier in a nearby area to see how the service might work at other reservations, Enjady said.

“We've installed Motorola systems in seven towns,” he said. “We are providing just wireless broadband.”

MATI also is finishing tests of various combinations of analog telephone adapters and IP phones with MetaSwitch's product.

“Because IP telephony is really not regulated, we're not even set up as a CLEC,” Enjady said. “We are offering broadband service wirelessly with IP telephony packaged in, and number portability to move existing numbers over to this network. One of the things that we are doing is testing this close to us because this is something we want to do at the reservations. We think we can get broadband RUS [Rural Utility Service] grants to do this. Other tribes can deploy more of these softswitches around the country, and they can IP back to our gateway and provide IP telephony as well.”

The real challenges to offering the service don't involve the technology but rather the business case, both Enjady and Randall said.

“You have to worry about customer acquisition costs, marketings and putting an attractive service package together,” Randall said.

“The hardest thing is trying to figure out what the demographics are going to be, what is going to be the take rate,” Enjady added. “There are many unknowns — and no one is doing this in the rural areas. We've just got to take our first stab at it. It's a living thing that is going to have to change a few more times to get something that is going to work for us.”

MATI's expectation is that the take rate will be high because many of its potential customers have no other options for high-speed Internet access.

“Farmers and ranchers have been using satellite services,” he said. “But the satellite systems have a lag time, and people aren't happy with it. Also, during snowstorms, it fades out, and you lose your service.”

Thus far, the broadband wireless service has weathered winter storms better than expected, Enjady says.

Randall expects broadband wireless options to proliferate as more carriers realize the out-of-region opportunities.

For MATI and Enjady, however, the technology could represent the answer to a long-standing problem, and the potential to bring economic development to areas where it is badly needed.

“If we get the reservations connected, they can provide call centers, customer service and other services for companies,” he said.

Jobs that are outsourced beyond U.S. borders could be retained.

This is a subject about which Enjady is passionate.

“I want to make sure the Indian country is addressed in the Telecom Act if it is rewritten,” he said. “It wasn't addressed last time, and it needs to be addressed. Reservations should have been receiving a lot of these services. And they should relax regulations and rules for tribes that want to start their own telephone companies. Most of the telephone companies that serve reservations are the bigger companies like Qwest, SBC, CenturyTel — and there's not too many out there doing any work with the tribes, broadband wise. They are like a third-world country. But if they can relinquish those properties and give it to a company like us, we'll make it world class.”